Important follow-up to my comment: as fewer people do X -- live music, medicine, education, you name it -- fewer talented people do it as well.

Fields need a large base of participants to produce great ones. This is exactly why software has been so extraordinary over the past 30 years: an unusual concentration of gifted minds across the entire humankind committed themselves to it.

In my view, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter equivalents today probably aren't writing symphonies. They've decided to write code for a living. Which is why any Great American Songbook made today won't hold a candle next to one from 1950s.