I was looking through www.metal-archives.com and it just blows me away how many bands there are. I believe in order to make it onto that website you need to be a mostly original band, i don’t have a cite, but that’s beside the point.
That website only includes heavy metal and all of its various sub-genres. So given an average band, of a guitarist, bassist, drummer, and vocalist. How many possible musical arrangements are there? And if your feeling really ambitious, what about when you add a keyboard, sampler, etc?
I don’t dispute your general point, but it wouldn’t be infinite by any reasonable standard of “sameness” of songs. If we say, for example, that two ten-minute things must be the same song if their representation on a CD is identical, then the number is finite–namely 2^(number of bits in ten minutes of CD-quality sound)–although huge. That’s counting too many; the same song, performed by the same band, as identically as they can, will have many different CD-quality representations. And if we abstract further, e.g., to all ten minute standard musical scores for five instruments, with no smaller than, say, 64th notes, the number of songs is much smaller. But still huge.
It’s just the general fallacy of equating infinity with a very large number. It’s common colloquially but can be somewhat confusing in the more academic context of this forum.
