Millions
There are 20 places on the list, 14 of them occupied by musicians, 3 by authors, 2 by actors, 1 by a race-car driver. There isn't a direct numerical correspondence to cultural values, but there is some parallel there, a relatively accurate reflection of what we are and what we value.
What it says to me is that the significance of music and musicians in human life has been substantially obscured. Our sense of music's importance has been eroded until it's a common assumption that music is no more or less culturally valuable than water skis or candy. Something people like, but not something they need.
It's true in a laboratory sense that people don't need music to live - they don't need anything beyond food and water to live - but it isn't hard to make the case that life, especially for human beings, is more than personal survival.
Human life is a group project - music orchestrates group cohesion, it keeps us together. That's not trivial, or peripheral.
As I said before, every formal human experience except birth is held together by music. It's only been since the early 20th century that armies stopped marching into battle to drums and more. Music is central, integral, vital; yet we've let it become a commodity, because the line between the superfluous and the essential was too hard, or too hidden, to draw and defend. The idea that something so central to human experience could become a "thing" that could be owned privately and withheld from common experience for private gain, that it could be separated from what we are to the extent that we would have to pay for it constantly in order to have it at all, is a truly alien concept.
link KWSnet
