The Beatles spent YEARS only playing other people's music. Five/six hours a night performing covers. It seems self-evident that gaining such an intimate understanding of chord structures and melodies and harmonies from OTHERS helped them when they eventually created their own songs.

I think the same ideas can be applied to any hobby/job/industry. Picasso first learned how to paint a realistic apple... Wozniak spent years making calculators ... and I'm sure there are modern plumbing techniques created by someone who spent years learning the traditional techniques and decided to try something better. (Are there any famous, non-video game plumbers? There should be.)

Ignore the haters and copy other people's stuff.

And classical musicians _very literally_ make a living 'covering' the work of other composers and likely get started learning through 'copying'.

Any differences around 'Oh, but it's their job to play other works' (ignoring that some trained classical musicians also count themselves as composers) is ignoring the fact that learning _anything_ is a process that involves mimicry.

There's also the fact that most people don't want to hear new music. You go to the bar and there's a band, it's not the original or two they slip into the set that gets people listening - it's the covers of songs people already know.

The Beatles were one of the first British bands who had mostly original music on their first album. The Stones had only one original song on theirs. This was record company policy at the time - who would buy a record of songs they didn't know?