Do people remember peak oil? It’s the theory that running out of oil was never the problem, but the crunch that happens after you reach a peak in production.

Like once we empty out all the easy wells and output starts declining, if demand remains the same then naturally there would be less and less to go around. Which would cause prices to shoot up, send shockwaves through the economy.

We have always seemed to manage to find new oil, and the real issue seems to be burning it into the atmosphere. But the pattern must hold for a lot of other things, there’s talk of peak cobalt, peak helium, or even peak cocoa. So what I’m wondering here is if it could even apply to something like music. Could we eventually start running out of new songs?

Now, music is admittedly a very infinite and immaterial thing. The question of running out of lithium is something very different than running out of blues riffs.

But what our copyright laws do is create an ‘artificial scarcity’ – we limit access to music so people have to pay for it, and musicians get paid. And when something is scarce, that implies – almost by definition – that you can run out of it.

There are a few different components of music, but I think this is most relevant to melody. Melodies are the often-repeating sequences of notes that make up songs. The guitar bit from the Rolling Stone’s ‘Satisfaction’, the chorus to the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’, the guitar solo in ‘Stairway to Heaven’, all of it is melody (I’m going to use a lot of classic rock examples in this article, as I think it’s a genre a lot of people are familiar with, and it’s good music).