Thanks I have no intrinsic idea of what perfect pitch is. I don’t think it’s important to my enjoyment of music, as you correctly imply.
Don’t forget about marketing and luck. Both of those are big, too.
To put it simply: Most people have a sense (to varying degrees) of relative pitch. Relative pitch will let you know that one tone is higher-pitch than another tone, and by how much. When you hear two notes as being “in tune” with each other, or you hear that a chord is a little bit dissonant, that’s relative pitch at work. A good sense of relative pitch is clearly an asset for a musician, especially a musician using an analog instrument like the human voice.
What most people can’t do, however, except to a very trivial degree, is compare the pitch of one sound to the pitch of another sound they heard yesterday, or last week. So if you go to the orchestra, and every instrument in the orchestra is tuned a quarter-step flat, you won’t notice. If some of them are a quarter-step flat relative to others, you’d notice that, but not without anything to compare to.
Except for those few people with perfect pitch, which is usually used to mean perfect absolute pitch. With perfect absolute pitch, if you heard a note, all by itself, at 435 Hz, it would sound wrong, because it’s not the 440 Hz you’re used to, even if everything else is tuned down by the same amount. This is only relevant for musicians making music for other people with perfect absolute pitch, and since it’s a rare ability, it’s mostly irrelevant. And even if you do want to make music for someone with perfect absolute pitch, it’s not too hard to get a tuning fork or other reliable pitch standard, and use your relative pitch to tune everything to that.
Yep I’m the most people. I guess.
There’s another thing at work here. 10-15 years ago, I called it the ‘God of IT’…when The God of IT turned it’s attention to your field, things got amazingly better and amazingly cheaper. Think Television: You went from 5-10 Analog Channels to 200 digital channels…Satellite dishes went from 20 foot monstrosities to a 2 foot dish that was affordable by many more people…likewise, music went from wall filling collections to 'streamable from anywhere direct to your earbuds.
Sure. There’s a loss in quality (200 channels of crap) and fidelity, and you’re renting the music forever rather than owning the cassette that got worse with each play.
At the same time, the tech was democratized…the Beatles had a lot of talent, but also access to the technology and distribution medium and there were fewer bands to compete against.
Now, the recording studio (and movie studio, and datacenter, and telecommunications network) are all in your pocket, and the software is largely free. Anyone can be their own network on Youtube.
Which means more people can do stuff, so more talent vies for less attention, and less compensation.
It also makes it harder for someone to make a living using their talent this way. Much the same way that a product that may cost $100 to create in an American workshop, will be copied and sold for $15 brought over on a boat.