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).

Really all the guitar bits, verses, choruses, and solos are melody. Alongside rhythm and timbre, melody is basically what music is.

Copyright gives people a monopoly on the melodies in their songs. The Beatles (or actually maybe Sony) own the melodies in ‘Yellow Submarine’, and they have a legal right to control their use. We don’t think about it a lot, but owning a copyright actually gives you a right to censor – if someone uses your melody in a song, you have the right to block that song from being played.

In the real world it usually just works out that the offender has to pay a % of their profits. But legally a song can be silenced. These days it could still end up on Pirate Bay, but that’s another story.

There are some exceptions to this, one of the biggest being that you don’t need permission to record your own version of other people’s songs (a ‘cover’ song). That’s because there is something called ‘compulsory licensing’ for covers, which is exactly what it sounds like – it’s compulsory to give a license. Nobody can legally stop you if you want to do your own version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, you just basically have to pay about 10 cents per copy you sell.

You can’t change a cover around very much – if you want to change the lyrics, for example, you need the copyright owner’s permission. Otherwise we’be hearing ‘The Rhythm of the Right’ and ‘Alt-Right Now’ at campaign rallies.

Even translations require permission, although you can import songs into different genres – doing bluegrass or lounge or punk versions seem to be fine. It’s kind of a funny thing – covers are allowed, but you can be blocked if you want to use the main ‘Satisfaction’ riff as part of a completely different song, or even just do hip-hop over a 3 second loop of the drum track (a ‘sample’).

There are obviously a lot of good reasons why our copyright laws work the way they do. I’m assuming you already know the logic by which copyright allows musicians to make money, and artists deserve to be paid. We don’t want giant villain-studios stealing the best songs from all the little garage bands and putting out super-processed versions of them across the radio with subtle political messages.

What’s fair aside, musicians would probably still make music without copyright. But it probably wouldn’t be as good, and the quality of recorded music in particular could be expected to suffer drastically. Recordings might not serve so much of an economic purpose beyond advertising live shows.

And it goes beyond the economic. Having a copyright means that what artists create is theirs – they have control over it, where and how it is used, how it is packaged and sold, what different versions are released, everything.

But at the same time copyright is taking something from the creative world, and walling it off into the legal entity that is a song. I’m not going to say that these melodies people own are the building blocks of music. But I don’t know if each melody is a unique thing that should only exist in the one original song it was first used in. Do musicians invent new melodies, or are they just discovering them?

Melodies do seem to work in a lot of different musical contexts, there’s certainly the potential to reuse bits of songs in other songs. To give an example, I remember seeing it in the news when Sam Smith’s 2014 song ‘Stay With Me’ was accused of copying Tom Petty’s 1989 hit ‘I Won’t Back Down’ (I have the tape!).

You can listen to the two of them side by side on Youtube, and it’s fairly clearly the same melody, so Tom Petty and cowriter Jeff Lynne got 12.5% each of the songwriting royalties. Apparently a lawsuit was never even discussed – maybe Sam Smith didn’t think Tom Petty would let it go.

Nonetheless all parties seemed convinced that it hadn’t been theft, that Sam Smith had just come up with the same melody on his own. Tom Petty acknowledged this is a common occurrence in the creative process:

“All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by. Sam’s people were very understanding of our predicament and we easily came to an agreement.”

So well and good, everything worked out in the end. But from the sounds of it, Sam Smith’s song never would have existed if they had realized it was a copyright infringement. And it was a successful song, #1 in New Zealand and Canada, up to #2 in the USA.

As of when I originally wrote this article, it was his most successful song. Since then he’s gone in some new directions – Unholy scare-the-conservatives stuff being blared down on us from the grammies, wow.

But a large part of the success of ‘Stay With Me’ must have been that one melody.  Otherwise he’s getting pretty ripped off paying 25% of royalties. Although at the same time it feels like he innovated and created something new, it wasn’t just a cheap knock off. In Sam Smith’s song the offending melody is in the chorus, in Tom Petty’s it’s the verse.

So maybe melodies aren’t getting developed. Fifth Harmony’s song ‘Worth It’ opens with a really good Balkan-Middle Eastern style saxophone sample. The sample seems like something you could do a whole song around, but – noting that I don’t actually know the full history and ownership of the sample – I believe it’s now locked into that one song.

I could complain here about the message of doing a song about being ‘worth it’, but I think that would be hyper-critical, maybe it’s an affirming feminist message, I’ve got no problem with that. The rest of the song is good, it was a big hit, but me I wouldn’t put it on a playlist and rock out to it driving or anything. I like weird stuff like Balkan music.

You could try doing a 10 minute jazz improv cover of it that said ‘give it to me I’m worth it’ a couple times at the end, but even that would probably run afoul of the law. The melody and lyrics have to be ‘substantively’ similar, or it’s considered a ‘derivative’ work, and you need permission to release it. Although there do seem to be some instrumental covers surviving on Youtube.

Even just having melodies linked to certain specific lyrics can be problematic. For one it means a particular bit of music is always tied to one specific story. I don’t know if the upbeat tempo and lively melody of CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” really corresponds to its apocalyptic lyrics. Maybe it does, maybe it’s connected to some weird woo-hoo it’s a disaster mood that’s good to be in if you’re trying to outrun a hurricane.

But if there are songs like ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ that have even questionably disagreeable lyrics (arguably it’s a little rape-y), it would be nice to be allowed to just go ahead and change them. Historically bards and minstrels and the like would all do their own versions of lyrics.

There’s a classic old British Folk song by Cyril Tawney called ‘Sally Free and Easy’, which he wrote back in 1958. It’s been covered a lot, although maybe there’s some consensus in folk circles that Davy Graham did one of the better versions of it – he really brought the melody forward. In actual fact, legally Davy Graham probably should have gotten permission to change it, even if it isn’t so different.

The song is about a perhaps overly easy-going woman who is free of the cares of the world, and heedlessly breaks the heart of a soldier off to war. But the English language has changed around the song with the passing years, and I just don’t know if my generation has the maturity to get past the fairly obvious double entendre. Assuming Cyril Tawney wasn’t in fact having fun with us.

If you did want to change the lyrics, you would need permission from Cyril Tawney’s estate, or whoever actually owns the copyright. Technically there’s an argument you’d need permission from Davy Graham’s as well, if you wanted to use his melody, as it is reasonably different (there’s probably actually a decent number of illegal covers out there – maybe I shouldn’t even be saying anything). The one exception to this would be parody – if you specifically wanted to change the lyrics to make fun of it, that would be legal under ‘fair use’. Although Weird Al still makes sure to get legal permission before recording his songs.

Not to single anyone out here. All this stuff is happening every single time someone writes a new song. Melodies are getting locked away forever in their original expression. Or if not forever, at least until decades down the road when the copyright expires.

And if these melodies are in fact finite, then I would assume we could start eventually running out of them. Or better reach a peak, where we are still writing new songs, but just not as many good ones as before, while we increasingly start looking back to the classics of yesteryear.

It could well be that whole genres have been denied their later generations. Jazz for one must really be generating a lot of copyrights. A pop or rock song might be based on maybe 5 melodies, while Jazz is laying down 20 melodies a minute.

Maybe this is a polemic thing to say, but I feel like Jazz is very much a genre that had a golden age and has since kept shuffling along, still popular and good but never at its former peak. Or if you look at Rock and the Blues, a lot of it is based on the pentatonic minor scale, which is only made up of five notes, compared to 7 or 8 notes for a lot of other types of music. Just mathematically, that’s a lot fewer potential combinations.

Historically music has been made by people borrowing melodies from other songs, modifying them, developing them, bringing them into new genres, doing them in their own style. One of the greatest classic rock bands is Led Zeppelin, who were known for their prolific borrowing. But they improved on the melodies they used, they were definitely innovators who also came up with a lot of good stuff. If you listen to their albums, they really have a lot of good songs.

Likewise a lot of genres – from Blues to Irish Folk to Flamenco to Reggae to Klezmer – developed under conditions without much of any copyright law. They all have public domain melodic patterns that are used and reused.

Mozart would have seen copyright extended to sheet music in the UK during his lifetime, but copyright law either didn’t exist or wasn’t relevant for the classical composers. They regularly borrowed from each other.

All that said, it is certainly the case that there are really a lot of potential melodies out there. Getting into every star in the sky times every drop of sand on the beach kind of stuff, and that’s just using the 12 notes of western music. But most arrangements of those 12 notes don’t sound good, try hitting random notes on a guitar (Which, as an aside, is actually hard to do – if you do start hitting random notes, you will probably naturally fall into a musical pattern).

And if we’re talking about the ones that sound really good, there are very few – you can record a hit song if you write a new one. Likewise music seems to concentrate around a relatively small number of patterns – non-musicians are often amazed when they discover how many songs are all the same three or four chords.

Melody is a funny thing, isn’t it? That there’s just these certain combinations of notes that sound really good, that we like much more than other combinations of notes. To really get to the bottom of this question of peak music, perhaps we need to understand what exactly music is.

And that takes us into some murky scientific waters. Delving into the psychology of music, I’m really struck that we just don’t understand why exactly we like music, or how exactly it affects us.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has called music ‘auditory cheesecake’ – just a pleasant evolutionary by-product without much meaning. Maybe part of it is showing off fitness to potential mates. Darwin and others have suggested that singing might have acted as a protolanguage on the way to developing proper language and speech – that before talking we all just sang to each other, like the birds.

I for one think music is something pretty profound. One way or another it seems to me that music is communicating something. It has been called the ‘language of emotion’, it’s like a key to inspiring certain states of mind, maybe it even teaches psychological patterns, who really knows.

I use ‘key’ in a very literal sense there, because it is very much a key, a code. One distinct pattern of jumps between higher and lower pitched notes unlocks an ecstatic psychological state, while another is random dissonant noise, another is Nickelback.

We must be built for music, you don’t need to be taught to appreciate it. And it’s amazing how easy it is to remember a complex melody– compare memorizing a melody to an equivalent series of random letters with different durations.

Talking all this classic rock, I feel like the quickest way to understand where people’s heads were at during the 60s is to listen to the music. Or that you can understand something of a Turkish state of mind by listening to their lute music.

The question of whether music is universal is actually a little controversial. But they do studies playing people music from cultures other than their own, and people tend to be able to tell if a piece is happy or sad. Or guess at its general themes.

We in the west – at least – tend to associate the major scale with happy music, and the minor scale with sad music, but scientifically we can’t say why. That’s stranger still given that lots of people seem to find listening to sad music makes them happy.

I for one think we can all enjoy Indian Carnatic Music, Latin American Cumbias, Middle Eastern semi-tones, or Georgian Polyphonies. Maybe it can take a few listens to get into stuff you aren’t familiar with. I myself listen to all sorts of music from cultures foreign to me, and I feel pretty solid in assuming I’m getting much of the same experience as they do when they listen to it.

At the same time there is also very clearly individual taste. Which in turn varies according to what kind of mood you are in. Music can be both universal and cultural – this would be the case if all music does in fact represent some kind of underlying fundamental primal emotional code, but certain cultures prefer different codes. The cultural and the individual is the part of the universal that you like.

The exception is the norm, but in North America – for one – there are sort of cultural lines between people who listen to hip hop, compared to country, or classic rock, jazz.

Do these people then have different things going on in their head? Do people in the Middle East experience the world differently because of all the augmented seconds in their music, does Reggae’s off-beat give its listeners a distinctive character?

There was a lot going on in the 50s and 60s, but I can’t help but wonder if some part of the cultural changes stemmed from using more of the pentatonic minor scale with rock music. Faced with the rise of new genres like jazz or rock there was a lot of pushback – people were warning against exactly the sorts of things that did actually seem to end up happening during those times. No less than Plato warned that “musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”

Who really knows. Given that we don’t understand exactly how music affects us, this is all a little vague. But maybe another example could be illustrative here. An old favorite of mine is The Animal’s ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. I think I’m safe in saying it’s considered one of the great classics of rock, a song that has held up over time. It’s not a good song for an open mike because someone might do it before you. Thus – as with any popular song – I would infer that it some way resonates psychologically.

The lyrics are a classic morality tale, a gambling addict looking back on a life wasted on sinful living. I don’t think you really have to be a gambling addict to like the song though. Melody must not correspond to something as specific as a set of lyrics, I imagine the music would work with a variety of similar stories.

But maybe it takes you to a psychological place where that gambler would be, looking back on life. It’s cathartic, transcendent, seeing yourself and your life from far away, seeing things as they really are, being awake, it’s a little bit spiritual. Maybe I’m reading in a bit, and music is just a hard thing to describe in words. But if you like the song then I get the feeling you are probably getting an idea of what I’m talking about.

Interestingly, the question of who owns the copyright for that recording is a little complicated. The song ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ isn’t actually owned by anybody – it’s considered traditional, it’s been passed down the generations and nobody even knows who wrote it. Wikipedia says it probably has roots in English folk music. The earliest known recording is from 1933, by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster. Woody Guthrie did a version, as did Bob Dylan, there’s a few more recent versions.

The Animal’s version is melodically distinct, however, so maybe you could get sued if you used the arpeggio guitar riff or sung melodies in a different song. As a traditional song you’re free to do a cover of it though (or even reuse the traditional melodies in a different song), and you can legally do a cover of The Animal’s version if you sing it the same way and pay them royalties. I believe you’d have to get permission to sample any of the above-mentioned recordings.

That’s because stuff from 1933 is still under copyright. In the USA copyrights from 95 years ago are starting to expire now (it is a little more complicated than that, and every country has their own rules, if they tend to be similar). So on January 1, 2021, music published in 1925 entered the public domain – it’s no longer copyrighted, you can do whatever you want with it. And most music from after that is still copyrighted.

In many ways copyright laws are a vast experiment, one which we are smack in the middle of. Most of the music people listen to these days is from after 1925 – or if not, was recorded after 1925. So really almost all of modern music is copyrighted, and owned by a small number of big studios.

While for the vast majority of human history copyright laws didn’t exist. In the UK copyright was granted for sheet music in 1777, in the USA it was 1831, Wikipedia says Germany’s copyright laws weren’t enforceable until 1871. We don’t even have a lot of examples of what happens when a genre of modern music goes into the public domain.

So really this is all coming from a very speculative place. But I do feel like we are probably missing out on a lot of good music. I imagine there are some intellectual property Anarcho-Libertarians who want to get rid of copyright law altogether.

There has been a project to use an algorithm to pre-copyright every possible melody then put them in the public domain, but I feel like that’s on pretty shaky legal ground. Whether you like it or not, I think getting rid of copyright law altogether is pretty unrealistic, and generally we should put an emphasis on realism when choosing our causes.

And being able to make money from writing songs seems to be an important part of creating music. It is only fair, right? Generally we don’t want to reduce the number of people being paid for their work, in this world.

Copyrights do tend to end up being owned by big recording studios, but the fact that big recording studios can own copyrights means they are willing to invest in artists. Which maybe isn’t optimal, but it’s easy to be overly cynical as well.

It does so happen, however, that there is in fact a very small tweak to copyright law that could probably actually fix this overnight. As I mentioned above, you aren’t allowed to use melodies from copyrighted songs without permission, but you can legally do your own version of a song, a cover. This is because there is a system of ‘compulsory licensing’ for cover songs.

So we could just expand compulsory licensing to include the individual melodies that make up songs. And/or samples of recorded music, although that’s sort of a separate question. If Sam Smith wants to use Tom Petty’s melody, he can just go ahead and do it, all he has to do is pay royalties. The only real difference would be that the royalty rate is fixed, and the existing owner of the copyright loses their right to block the usage of their property.

That probably sounds like a minor detail, but I really don’t think we would want to underestimate what a radical effect this would have on music. As it stands getting a license can be prohibitively difficult, there’s generally a lot of expensive legal wrangling involved. That the copyright owner has a veto means they have a really strong hand in negotiations, and often it’s difficult or impossible just figuring out who owns a copyright. Which is kind of funny in and of itself, if you think about it.

At this point you might be wondering if there’s a catch. There’s always a catch with these things, or my logic is flawed somewhere, otherwise wouldn’t we of changed the law already? Well, the catch here is that this would do exactly what it says it would do. If I wanted to take the melody from whatever hit song and do my own song around it, I could just go ahead and do that, then put it on the radio.

All the great classic melodies would be re-appearing in all sorts of strange new songs, third-rate musicians would be trying to score hits butchering all your favorites, there would be a blooming of thousands of the singing Sweet Home Alabama song. Listening to music could become a constant guessing game, what’s that bassline from!

I assume there would be all sorts of complicated issues to resolve and unintended consequences. I don’t know how they would calculate the royalty rate – a standard % based on how many seconds of a song a melody was playing for, or how different it is, if it would be higher for melodies from more popular songs. We could at least block songs based on recycled melodies from being used in things like movies or advertisements – that’s how licensing works for cover songs now.

Compulsory licensing could benefit existing copyright holders financially. It could go either way – on one hand having a veto means they can probably get much more for each individual license they give. But with a compulsory license, a much higher % of songs would probably be re-using melodies, so a higher % would be paying royalties.

Generally there are always winners and losers with these things. Maybe people would stop listening to old recordings if new songs were being made with their best melodies. But that can happen with the existing system for covers we have now. Scoring a hit with a reused melody would probably also generate interest in the original.

Sitting down and doing the math, it could be that the group who loses out would be future musicians who write original songs. They would have more competition from music that was reusing old melodies, a higher % of total music profits would end up as royalties paid to existing copyright holders.

Just structurally, future musicians aren’t as influential – they’re still writing songs in their parent’s basements, they can’t really throw their weight around as a group. And they would probably be combining their new innovations with old melodies, so it might just work out they write better songs and pay royalties.

But again I don’t think the biggest issue here would necessarily be economic. Musicians (and record labels) like having a monopoly over their creations, they only want their melodies to be played in their original song-forms. Requests to sample regularly get denied because the copyright owner doesn’t like how they would be used – James Brown for example specified that his music was not to be sampled in anything promoting drugs or violence.

We just get bored of music, melodies would be cheapened if they can be used in whatever song. Classical music offers a case study in how public domain music can be overplayed – the New York Times did an article about how nobody wants to play Für Elise in concert halls anymore. Although this does seem to be less of an issue for other public domain music, like various folk traditions or early music.

There’s probably an argument that all this is moot, as well. Musicians could be making requests to license individual melodies under the existing legal framework, but I generally don’t think that happens very often. Are the Eagles getting a lot of requests to use the melodies from Hotel California in completely different songs?

Usually whenever someone reuses a melody, it’s accidental, or perhaps sometimes more ‘accidental’. Such as was in fact the case for Hotel California, which is fairly similar to a Jethro Tull song called ‘We Used to Know’.

But one way or another, those accidental uses do seem to happen often enough, and the history of music is a story of borrowing and improving. My feeling is that the issue here is a taboo against using other people’s melodies.

It’s funny how sampling is seen as much more legitimate. Samples are a reference, a piece of musical collage, creating something new with the old. If they still do want you to get a license. But reusing a melody is seen as straight up theft, and sneaky theft at that, like you were hoping you could just say it was ‘accidental’ if anybody noticed.

So maybe the root issue – if there is a root issue – is a culture of only using melodies once. And maybe that’s ok, maybe they are unique expressions, maybe they only need to exist in their original usage. It could be that the nature of melodies is that they are born perfectly formed. Generally changing a few notes in a melody will either create something that doesn’t sound as good, or will be something that the original songwriter has already done during the original song. You don’t have to change a melody too much for it to be something new – Jethro Tull never sued the Eagles.

Although even then it would be nice to recombine melodies in new songs, or build on top of melodies. How much of the psychological effects of music are single key melodies, and how much of it is the combination of melodies into the different sections of a complete song? Do you get in the ‘Hotel California’ mood just straight from the fingerpicked chords it opens with, is it the interplay of the chord progression and the sung melody, would it have a different psychological effect with a different chorus?

It’s a nuanced point, but I also wonder how unique each melody is. Can you just listen to whatever bluesy rock song and get pumped into a rock mood, or does each individual melody inspire a certain individual specific psycho-emotional state?

Changing the laws to allow compulsory licensing would probably direct us towards a culture that was more friendly to reuse. There might be some pushback to start, but in the end people would be writing good new songs with old melodies, and I assume it would become more acceptable.

Maybe it could even make cross-cultural pollination more acceptable as well. Aside from music made by Afrodescendant people, there seems to be a slight taboo against using melodic patterns from cultures outside your own.

Cultural appropriation is just one side of the coin, there’s also cultural monopolization. As it stands whole groups of musical patterns do seem to be strongly associated with particular ethnicities. Just not being able to change lyrics can make it harder to do covers of songs in foreign languages.

Hypothetically we could also have a compulsory licensing system within the existing legal framework. Copyright holders could just go ahead and allow compulsory licensing for their properties. When you copyright something, you can decide how it can be used, the non-profit ‘Creative Commons’ has a whole set of alternative types of licenses.

There’s databases like that for samples, and the existing system for licensing songs on the radio is very similar to compulsory licensing. Radio DJs generally don’t have to get permission for each individual song they play.

Even if the ball got rolling for something like that, it would still be an opt-in system, however. So a lot of the best melodies might still not be available. While I generally think opt-in systems are much more feasible and realistic, people do tend not to opt-in.

All-you-can-eat music streaming services like Spotify have really great selection, but they don’t have everything. When a band decides not to put their music on Spotify, that means for you the consumer it’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet where you have to pay extra for the crab cakes.

Everyone has to subscribe to Spotify because it has so much good stuff, but then they have to buy that one band’s music individually, it’s something almost parallel to free riding. If, certainly, there can be good reasons why bands are hesitant. The law could say these services have the right to offer any published song if they pay a royalty – that’s another version of compulsory licensing.

I feel like there’s a risk of us going in a bad direction in general for those things. If you want access to the full buffet of TV and movies, you have to get a subscription to Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and even then that doesn’t cover everything.

We could have compulsory licensing for news stories, academic journals, any number of things. Canada used to have compulsory licensing for pharmaceutical drugs, for example. Companies could manufacture generic versions of drugs that were still under patent, they just had to pay royalties. Don’t necessarily expect the above-mentioned industries to go out and campaign for compulsory licensing, though.

Those are examples of compulsory licensing for end products. Taking it still another direction, how about a legal right to remake and market documentaries with extra scenes added? People could comment on anything they might feel needed clearing up. There could be a whole aisle in the bookstore dedicated to new versions of Harry Potter with different endings, you could download extra levels for all your favorite video games.

Some of that is probably going a little too far. It’s certainly veering further and further off topic. The arguments I have been making here are about something very specific, the legal right to reuse melodies from existing songs.

Melody is something unique, it doesn’t have a lot of direct parallels. As it stands you can legally write novels about debonair British Secret agents fighting supervillains in ways that you just can’t reuse the ‘Seven Nation Army’ riff.

Maybe this is a realistic enough cause. This is specifically an example of a very small legal change that would have huge implications. All I’m talking about here is BASICALLY some minor adjustments to the existing laws for cover songs. It could be approached in a minimalistic way. Maximum lengths for samples, prohibitions against obscene or commercial uses, high royalty rates.

It could even just be an exemption that automatically grants compulsory license for similar melodies, as a shield that would limit the maximum payout for people like Sam Smith or the Eagles. There’s been some abuse of copyright laws lately, parasitical law firms going after anyone with deep pockets, strange legal decisions like the ‘Blurred Lines’ case where only vaguely copying the ‘feel’ of a song was enough for a multi-million dollar penalty.

Compulsory licensing is a minor political issue right now, driven mostly by people who want to make sampling cheaper and easier. No less than MTV themselves have an article arguing for compulsory licensing on their webpage.

A 2016 white paper by the Internet Policy Task Force of the US Department of Commerce did briefly look into a compulsory license for samples, although they didn’t think stakeholders were particularly enthusiastic. Compulsory licensing for samples is something slightly different than compulsory licensing for melodies, but I think each of them would probably lead to the other.

In the end, we don’t know how music would be different if we had a legal system more permissive of melodic re-use. Nor how exactly that in turn would affect humanity’s socio-psychological-cultural state. But I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying things would be radically different. It would be a pretty big thing, to let anybody use anyone’s music.

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.