Music reproduction is art

Check out Evan Eisenberg's book The Recording Angel (much admired by John Atkinson of Stereophile, among others). Eisenberg's thesis is that the recording engineer or producer is very much an artist, and the recording is indeed a work of art. A sampling:

“The word ‘record’ is misleading. Only live recordings record an event; studio recordings, which are the great majority, record nothing. Pieced together from bits of actual events, they construct an ideal event.”

“One is supposed to judge a stereo system by comparing its sound to live music. If the music one listens to is pure phonography—a pure audio product—that is impossible.” 

“Even in the classical sphere, live music is only one touchstone of recorded sound. Fidelity itself is a vexatious concept.”

Eisenberg goes on to compare the role of the recording producer to that of a movie director. Live recordings are analogous to filming a stage play, while studio recordings are “like movie making as we usually understand it”: an art in its own right, a way of “exercising artistic judgment.” The first half or so of the long central chapter on "Phonography" focuses on giving examples of this art from classical music (some of which really amazed me—for instance, that in the recordings of the very famous Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, the most beloved Isolde of all, her “top notes” were actually sung by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf and dubbed in!); the latter half offers examples from jazz, blues, rock and pop music. 

"The essence of art is the creative production of something. Ipso facto, reproduction is not art." (@yoyoyaya). But a recording IS "the creative production of something." You need to consider Eisenberg's argument, cited above. A recording is not merely a "reproduction" of anything, but rather, is very much the creative product of the producer, recording engineer, and so forth, in very many really interesting ways.

For that matter, the original "artwork" is not merely "the creative production of something," if you mean that this "creation" is out of whole cloth. Art is always produced in the context of other art; sometimes (as with much "modern" art, for instance) it cannot even be construed as "art" at all except insofar as it engages a tradition of art production. Are Warhol's silk screens of other people's photographs or his Brillo Boxes or Campbell's Soup Cans "the creative production of something" in the sense you seem to mean?