While I like the punchy title, I'd suggest the often invisible role of preliminary work IS a part of being creative. In music it's "demos," in art it's "sketches," in writing it's "drafts," etc. I write in my book, Creative Doing:

> This stage is far too early to demand perfection; it’s best to keep expectations low, to refrain from self-criticism, and to support psychological safety (the feeling that it’s okay to make mistakes) to allow every single detail of the idea to flow out.

It's related to the original post's mention of scarcity, and how "the path to writing a great song really is through hundreds of mediocre songs." The most reliable way to good work is to allow it to emerge through a lot of preliminary work (e.g., lots of drafts, demos, and sketches).

More on preliminary work here: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/draft-dem...

Why does every article have to start with a biography these days?

Started having way more fun (and making better music) when I released the "need" to make everything from scratch and just started dragging and dropping loops.

Now it's like I'm back in 2003 when my feature phone had a little music composer thing on it. You'd just slap together some presets.

Life is good.

Am an aspiring composer. We often say we have no qualms about "stealing" from other composers. Yeah, if we see an idea or technique used in piece of music we like, we won't hesitate to try it out in our own pieces. Of course, we don't actually steal to the point of plagarism, but it's pretty common to do, and the ideas we take are often modified for your own needs or just taken in parts.

Music does get to a point where raw expression/trial and experiment has to give way to a more ordered process to build an arrangement and structure. But I wouldn't call it a less creative part of the work. Much can be added to surprise and engage once you're onto building out how a song progresses, and techniques you learn can inform you of ways to move that would never have arisen through jamming out the whole thing. Plus there's still the opportunity for happy accidents to occur. Learning to do both well is part of the secret to making interesting music.