One could argue the comparison still holds for developers of video games - as long as the game's code is not touched upon release. Used to be the norm, nowadays admittedly seems to be disappearing.

Also the amount of skilled professionals needed to write a song and to write a game is slightly put - different.

A song surely requires a skilled professional. But a game required dozens of those, with years of experience and lots fo time.

Creative industries get way lower pay because the skill level needed is low compared to many others, like law, medicine etc.

If you are talented you can paint great pictures or be a great guitar player in 1-2 years.

To be a good doctor you need what? like 10? 20 years?

As both a professional programmer and a serious musician I have to _strongly_ disagree with this statement and implore you to consider your biases. I can only assume that you're making this assertion because you either a) don't play an instrument very well, or b) don't play an instrument at all.

First of all, even though "all in one" songwriter/producers exist today, you don't see them in the spotlight until they've already worked on their craft for many, many years. But in most cases, the commercial songs we listen to involve AT MINIMUM 1+ songwriters, 1+ producers, vocalist(s), professional instrumentalists (if it's not a band and/or a song where everything is programmed), an audio engineer, and probably a mastering engineer. And that's on top of the scaffolding of a bunch of other peoples' work (beatmakers, sample packs, recording studios/labels, etc etc). Each one of these people may not be formally educated, but you can bet they've spent years with trial and error honing their craft.

> If you are talented you can paint great pictures or be a great guitar player in 1-2 years.

What makes you think that? And if we're going to have such a low bar for "great", can't we say the same thing with programming? I mean, I know people who go to boot camp for 1 year, work for another, and then call themselves intermediate programmers and get paid $100k+. Same goes for law. I'm sure some real smart and performative people could become great lawyers within a year. The only reason that would never happen is because you literally have to go to law school for X years as mandated by law.

Don't mean to have such an aggressive reaction here, but I am really tired of the crafts being devalued so offhandedly.

Like games and software, the staff needed to make a song varies a lot.

If you want your [game, software, song, ...] to reach a certain level of polish and fame, you need a similar number of people working on it. Mixing, mastering, recording, composing. You need someone who's very good with sheet music and knowledgeable about all parts of an orchestra if you have any orchestral parts you want played on real instruments.

And so on.

Can I make a song in a week that'll impress a few tens of thousands people? Sure. People write in to me all the time saying "this is just what I needed!" They don't notice I banged it out in Ableton in an hour because it's what they needed. It's what I needed too, so it was easy to make it good enough. Just like you can make a game or a piece of software in a week that'll scratch a lot of people's itches even if it's not perfect.

Recently, I got back into photography, and it's the same. I can take a great picture on my own and impress a lot of people, but most famous photographers have a staff that rivals the biggest non-unicorn SV startups. Editors, lighters, second (or third) shooters, general A/V crew, marketing, office staff, etc.

Sorry, you unknown unknowns are leaking.

> Developers write and maintain software.

Which explains why they are so in love with evergreen software that constantly changes things largely for the sake of changing them I suppose.