That's not necessarily true at all. Imagine in 1900 I said, "We'll never get better at making digital music players until we start making them!", and then poured a bunch of money into single-purpose digital music players, at the expense of general purpose computing. Digital music players came around as a natural consequence of general purpose computing, not the other way around.
Additionally, at one point along our exponential growth curve, it became inexpensive to dedicate enough research funding to the creation of a digital music player that we got the beginnings of modern MP3 players. I don't see any reason why going to Mars will be particularly different - it's not like there's no overlap between the technology we need to survive there and the technology we need to thrive here.
There was a positive feedback loop between music technology and computing technology. Without efforts at playback and recording of music, the mercury delay lines that were used to make some of the first computers would have been impossible. Without the massive popularity of transistor radios it would have taken much longer to develop the semiconductor technology used in more modern computers, and without the Walkman the stabilized tape recorders early hobbyist computers used for storage would probably have been impossible (when audio skips it's annoying, when data skips it breaks your program). Same story for CDs; if ARM is the way forward for general-purpose computing, it wouldn't've happened without portable music.
Additionally, at one point along our exponential growth curve, it became inexpensive to dedicate enough research funding to the creation of a digital music player that we got the beginnings of modern MP3 players. I don't see any reason why going to Mars will be particularly different - it's not like there's no overlap between the technology we need to survive there and the technology we need to thrive here.