My wife only started learning drums a few years ago, and now she's regularly gigging with a band in a bunch of iconic venues around London. It's never too late to start! :)
I'm inclined to disagree. I believe the progress in music software has opened up new avenues and genres, it hasn't stifled existing ones. Instrument players are going to keep playing their instruments, just that now it's easier than ever for them to make their own professional sounding recordings and songs. On the flipside you have more and more people getting into music without requiring any formal musical background.
I also think the older we get, the more we think most music sounds the same because music inherently changes over time, and will be different to what we grew up on, but we also become more distanced from the subcultures and communities pioneering modern music trends. A young person today probably thinks all rock music from the 50s-90s sounds the same
I was at a conference called World Summit AI in 2018, where a vice president of Microsoft gave a talk on progress in AI.
I asked a question after his talk about the responsibility of corporations in light of the rapidly increasing sophistication of AI tech and its potential for malicious use (it's on youtube if you want to watch his full response). In summary: he said that it's the responsibility of governments and not corporations to figure out these problems and set the regulations.
This answer annoyed me at the time, as I interpreted it as a "not my problem" kind of response, and thereby trying to absolve tech companies of any damage caused by rapid development of dangerous technology that regulators cannot keep up with.
Now I'm starting to see the wisdom in his response, even if this is not what he fully meant, in that most corporations will just follow the money and try to be the first movers when there is an opportunity to grab the biggest share of a new market, whether we like it or not, regardless of any ethical or moral implications.
We as a society need to draw our boundaries and push our governments to wake up and regulate this space before corporations (and governments) cause irreversible negative societal disruption with this technology.
Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about.
Nintendo has a history of hosting competitive tournaments for games such as Pokemon (and even in a limited capacity Smash Bros). They even made a Pokemon game targeted at competitive players called Pokemon Unite, which they continue to organise tournaments for.
For Smash Bros in particular, they partnered with an e-sports company called Panda Global to officially sanction a circuit last year.
However, their awful track record with e-sports comes from mercilessly shutting down events they are not involved with (even when the organisers have reached out to Nintendo in good faith to discuss their involvment). They even go out of their way to dish out cease-and-desists at the last minute so that organisers don't have time to consider their legal options and rights before going ahead with the event.
There was a big scandal last year when Nintendo were having positive discussions about a partnership with a circuit called Smash World Tour then turned around and proceeded to threaten them just as the end of year finals were about to take place, forcing them to cancel an event that had been over a year in the making, and involving many professional players, hired staff and a lot of money (they could have just let them continue without being involved).
And just as a clarification, almost all these Smash events are not organised for profit by your big bad e-sports companies. Due to Nintendo's actions they have been mostly organically grown community-led efforts, all they want to do at the end of the day is have fun and play the game together.
Nintendo have shown time and again they will abuse their status as a big corporate entity to destroy harmless fan activity if they are not happy about it for any reason.
So just because you have a disdain for something in particular, you shouldn't project that onto a situation and use it as a false explanation for what's happening.
It actually is where ToneMatrix originates from, and is still one of the useable synths in the DAW!