More Authors than Audience?

Are the young blog writers spending more time creating/composing their work, both text and visual, than they are in reading the work of others? In the environment we now live within, it's entirely possible that overall more time is spent authoring than audiencing. This is a kind of reversal to what has happened in sound.

I remember my parents, when I was a child, singing in the basement below my bedroom. My Mom played the piano and Dad plus their two closest friends, my "aunt" and "uncle" sang hymns in harmony. All of them were in the choir except my Dad. They didn't listen to records or radio all that much. They were more performers than audience.

So, too, in the Sixties, I had some musician friends who liked to "jam" anytime they could find someone else to sing or play with them. They, however, were more audience than performers because they also spent hours listening to records and other musicians.

Since Gutenberg, despite private letters and business documents with small and private readership, the "publishing" of written work has been highly circumscribed with both economics and elite judges limiting which work could move into the public spere (like music recordings now.) Now with the ease of access to the web, people can "publish" their writing with little to no interference. Blogs are only one way of published. Theses and novels and commentary are all to be found on the web. The personal writer rules.

In music something quite different is happening. Relatively little personal music making is to be found on the web, especially as compared to the huge trade in copies of professionally made popular music. It is almost the opposite of books. There are books up on the web, but in very small proportion compared to blogs and personal journals.

On the web, with the written word, there are more authors than audiences; with music there are more audiences than performers. Why? And how is Karaoke different? Is it audience, performer, or hybrid?