I imagine some of you would have reservations towards these ideas. And these are reservations that I myself share. More than anything else, my purpose here has just been to try to write an interesting and thought-provoking article about music. But I do confess that the more I look at it, the more I feel like the benefits for creativity would far outweigh the negatives associated with a loss of control. As it stands, you can legally record any melody out there, you just have to do it in its existing song form. To me it’s kind of funny to allow that, but not the usage of those melodies in new and different songs.

Either way, given the assumptions above we are probably going to hit peak music at some point. But this would bump it many years into the future. And in the near term I don’t think we’re going to run out of new songs. There are whole scales of music from around the world that have hardly even entered into Western music.

But maybe it isn’t about the absolute quantity of new songs being written, but of our best melodies being locked into certain very specific and unchangeable musical expressions. Had the Eagles been more worried about lawsuits, it’s possible that Hotel California might never have existed. Music is something we really like, something that affects us in profound and mysterious ways. We should do everything we can to maximize the amount of good music that is out there.

Published August 30th, 2021