This episode makes the case for what comes after: a “post-enshittocene” music economy built around connection, agency, dignity, meaning, and joy instead of extraction. Drawing on a lifetime in music technology – from a university DAW project decades ahead of its time, through Fairlight Instruments and Digital Audio Research, to music education – host Michael Topic traces the gaps he kept hitting as a working musician and technologist, and lays out a portfolio of tools designed to close them. Along the way: the Estonian Singing Revolution as proof that music can be genuine social infrastructure, a hard look at what this would actually cost (and why that isn’t the real obstacle), and a closing argument that this only works as a coalition – not a pitch.
Click to read the full episode transcript
The Post-Enshittocene Music Manifesto – Full Episode 1 Transcript
Cold Open
Remember when rock was young? It was a time of joy and excitement. Of dreams and memories. Where your favourite songs marked the important milestones of your life forever. A time when you and your friends, with a few guitars and some bravado, could form a band, play a gig and have the audience sing along with the songs you played. People danced. People had fun together. They held listening parties for the latest album release. It felt communal. It felt familiar. It felt like it was ours. It gave millions of people meaning.
Today, the music business is in a bad way. Artists are not making a living. The business cares most about money, not art. There is a high churn of young hopefuls, whose star briefly shines brightly and then quickly fades into obscurity. More money than ever is being generated by music, as a business, but it’s disappearing into the pockets of gatekeepers and institutional investors. It’s one of the country’s strongest export earners. Yet royalties go unclaimed. Algorithms determine what gets heard. Most of what gets pushed hardest to audiences is somehow samey and trite. Talented musicians are burning out and giving up. There’s something wrong.
Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. A music industry that doesn’t nurture its providers or serve its audience well can’t go on forever. It will eventually stop. We are moving into an era where fairness has to return, or everybody will find something else to do with their time and attention. It could be argued they already are.
The music industry, like many others, is heading toward a post-enshittocene era. The injustice of exploitation and extraction will be rebalanced. If we choose to make it so, the complexion of music making and music enjoyment is much brighter. We can take it back, so that it belongs to us again. It can help us thrive in ways that were nearly impossible, with the current music industry. We can rediscover the joy and excitement of making and sharing music. Music is culture. It is communication. Communication is the foundation of civilisation. We can reclaim our history, our collective memory, our stories and our culture. Through the musical environment we collectively create.
This podcast episode is not a rant. It’s not a pitch. It’s the beginning of a coalition.
We are not trying to save an industry. We are trying to preserve a human capability.
Act I – The Diagnosis: How the Industry Became Extractive
Enshittification is a neologism, coined by the author and activist Cory Doctorow. A new word was necessary because it describes a very recent and widespread phenomenon. You might not have heard the term, but you’ve definitely felt its effects. Products, and especially software platforms, have been deliberately designed to degrade the experience of both creators and users, so that greater profits flow to shareholders. Companies discovered that being extractive, exploitative and abusive to every stakeholder but their investors was much easier than forever creating increasing value.
What does enshittification look like in the music industry? It’s playlists you can’t own and move, portably, between streaming services. It’s the restrictive terms and conditions built into music distribution platforms. It’s the unclaimed and unrecoverable royalties legally owed, but almost impossible for small, independent artists to claim. It’s the fig leaf of not being able to identify the songwriter that streaming services have hidden behind to avoid paying out. It’s the endless, opaque intermediaries that skim off a slice of an artist’s earnings. It’s being excluded from payouts at all, unless you get 1000 plays. It’s the algorithmic gatekeeping that stops new independent artists from being easily discovered. It’s the data harvested from both artists and fans, for purposes unknown. It’s the inability for an artist to own and grow their own fan database, which is portable and can be carried along with their career. It’s the endless playlist scams, takedown notices, pay-for-play swindles, and demonetisation of your music related content. It’s the shark-era record contracts, the breakage claw-backs that apply to obsolete physical product. It’s the plethora of obscure collection agencies you need, just to get paid what you’re legally entitled to. It’s being controlled and owned in ways that destroy your agency and artistic freedom. It’s the homogenisation of the forgettable music that makes it to the top of the charts.
This is a wellbeing crisis. It’s not merely an economic one. The enshittified aspects of the music industry lead to an erosion of human flourishing. It’s not just that artists don’t make a viable income. It’s the fact that thousands, maybe millions, of creative artists are never heard, and audiences are denied the thrill of discovering them. It’s that the listeners and the creators are not thriving.
Music has been officially classified, by successive conservative leaning governments, as a hobby, not a real job. People aren’t trained in it, because it doesn’t lead to jobs. It doesn’t lead to jobs because the music industry is fundamentally broken. We’re witnessing the degradation of music education to the extent where, if you don’t know how to make music, you are either excluded, or else tempted to create using generative AI tools exclusively, where the joy of creation is greatly diminished by the lack of durable skills learned. Musical literacy and agency has been sacrificed and eroded, on the altar of profit. While there is musical output, the rise of backward looking, identikit tracks, churned out by Suno and its ilk, are a symptom of the music industry’s malaise, not the disease itself. But it has led to a dilution of human experience.
In this episode we’re going to talk a lot about democratising access to the tools of music making, some of which don’t currently exist. Those tools, and access to them, are the route to defining a new music creation and appreciation landscape. The current music industry environment, and the general climate toward music education and the nurturing of artists, is eroding the conditions that sustain the craft. The deep skills are being lost. Both conditions can be true at once. We’ll be talking about what we can do. The music industry and the neoliberal consensus has all but consumed the art of music. We are trying to protect a culture and a communication craft, that’s older than both.
If this situation continues, what’s actually at risk isn’t “the music business.” It’s something much bigger and more important. It’s whether future generations know the exhilaration of making music at all. And if we lose that, we lose something immeasurably precious.
Act II – My Journey: What I Saw That Others Missed
You might be wondering to yourself, “Why does that guy care? What’s it to him?” I’ve been a musician for far longer than I’ve been a music technologist and product manager. One of my earliest dreams was to make music like the Beatles did in Abbey Road. But there were so many obstacles.
My friends and I played in bands, and our sisters-in-rock indulgently screamed on cue while we played our gigs, making us feel like real-life rock Gods. They danced like the Goddesses they were. We turned everything we had up to eleven.
But we couldn’t make and release a record of the type we could hear forming in our heads. That was like going to the moon. There was no guidance on how to write a good song, or produce it in a studio. No apps laden with all the clues. All you could do is try to second guess the professionals by listening to their records. Nobody let you in on the secrets.
When I left school, I got a job in a steelworks. Hard, dirty, dangerous work. Music took a back seat. I studied to get a “real” job, as an engineer working in electronics and computers. Something steady, not music. With the money I made at the steelworks, I rented some studios and tried to make a record. I got that done, but I couldn’t interest a record company. The gatekeepers denied access.
There was no independent path to reaching your audience. No technology to enable you to do that. You couldn’t easily find fans of what you did or keep in touch with them. Unless you were constantly gigging throughout a vast territory, there was no hope of building a sizeable fan base.
Even if you got signed, the terms were bad and the artist carried the financial risks. Recoupables. Cross-collateralisation. Breakages. It was like financing a career on a high interest rate credit card.
Meanwhile, my final year project at university was the Starbase Digital Music Processor – a DAW long before such software was really feasible. It pre-dated the popular ones we use today. On the strength of that effort, I was hired by Fairlight Instruments. At last I was finally combining music and engineering. That led me to travel the US as their Innovations Engineer, looking for every new technology I could find that could be pressed into the service of making music.
I met my wife at Fairlight. We married in her native England and I went on to work on Ambisonics and some of the first tapeless digital workstations, at Digital Audio Research. Throughout, I tried and failed, many times, to find a way to make a record. I bought early home recording studio gear — Portastudios, computers, early sequencers. I worked with people that went on to design the popular Akai sampler. We jammed. We dreamed. We made demos. Still no record.
We didn’t know how to define our own original style, as musicians. We always believed you had to follow the chart trends. Record companies insisted on it. We could see the most original artists were defining those trends, but we had no systematic way of seeing how our own artistry was emerging, through our many decisions about our music. There was no technology to help us notice the way our artistry was naturally evolving.
Through my work in music and audio technology, I got to meet many film music composers – famous ones – all still struggling to be chosen for the next big project, so that more of their music could be heard once again, despite their previous brief moments in the sun. I wasn’t alone in being kept at bay by gatekeepers. Finding an audience for anything that wasn’t aligned with the genre du jour was hard. There was no technical help to find them.
Much later, my time in music education led me to spot all the things music students weren’t being taught, but which they would need to know, to be successful, if they wanted to build a viable career in the music industry. Educators were creating musicians for a bygone age. Nobody taught royalties and collections. Nobody showed young musicians how to claim what they were owed. There was no education on maintaining ownership and control of their intellectual property assets. If you don’t learn that, then any crooked recording deal looks like a sure bet.
During periods of unemployment and economic uncertainty, I somehow finally made and released a record. So had many of my working colleagues.
The same gap kept showing up – getting your music noticed always presented a mountain to climb. It’s almost ridiculously hard to build and connect with your audience, not somebody else’s. You’re swimming against the tide if you don’t conform your art to an industry promoted trend. It’s true that it’s easier and cheaper than ever to record and make electronic music, easier to release it to streaming, but it’s still extraordinarily hard to get your music shared and to build a viable life around it.
Different gatekeepers have inserted themselves into the process. More cavalier critics than ever are positioned to demolish your spirit and confidence. It’s also easier than ever to be signed up naively to a rotten contract.
Every step of the way leaves you having to invent your own way forward, solo, trying to figure out how to do whatever it is you need to do next, to a high enough standard, to help your music along. And there are predators ready to devour you, every time you falter. There’s no app or platform taking your side, protecting your interests, even today.
This wasn’t a single insight. It was years of noticing the same absence of genuine, effective help, insight and guidance, from different angles, until it became impossible to unsee.
Everything about the music industry seemed intent on knocking you down, not lifting you up. Infinite middlemen existed, ready to take advantage of your time, money, originality and passion, but offering very little to nurture and recognise it, in return. Hardly anything to reward it. A series of objectively bad deals.
At some point, it begins to feel like a big, unnamed conspiracy working against your success in music. That’s when you realise it’s not a “me” problem anymore. It’s systemic. The game is rigged against artists and music lovers alike, in the interests of maintaining industry power and control. I can’t help thinking quantity surveyors don’t face as many of these obstacles.
Britney Spears, in a message to her sons about her conservatorship period, posted that she has no desire to return to the music industry, reflecting on how her experience with performing changed over the years.
“Not one time in those 15 years was it ever me and the way I use to think” – adding that her image “was to be too good,” and she was “never ever allowed to do anything wrong.” She said she was “brainwashed into an ignorant system where every goddamn person took advantage of me.” She added that during those years she felt “shamed, embarrassed, and forced to do all of it.”
What’s broken in the music industry becomes undeniable, once you’ve seen it enough times. The music industry devours and consumes its hopefuls. Have you recognised the same pattern in your own experience of music?
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are technologies that can be pressed into the service of guiding and protecting musicians, building their career and fanbase, identifying the artists’ own unique signature styles, finding people that love those quirks of art, making sure the artist is fairly paid, and sidestepping the more egregious predatory arrangements. With my product engineering hat on, I could see how it would be possible to provide alternatives to what musicians, like myself, were offered by an industry indifferent to their welfare. Looked at as a systems engineering problem, answers revealed themselves. What if these tools could be in the musicians’ hands as an interconnected portfolio of solutions? A toolkit, with each tool working in tandem, or stand alone. Wouldn’t that be empowering of the currently powerless?
Act III – The Vision: A Different Musical World
It has been found that the biggest improvements in human welfare come from just a handful of crucial factors.
Connection: regular conversation, shared experiences, friendship, community, and being treated as someone who matters. The World Happiness Report and work by Keyes identify social connection as a major driver of wellbeing, and link social disconnection with poorer mental health. Let’s imagine musicians’ tools that put connection at the heart of what they provide, combating the isolation frequently felt by struggling musicians.
Agency: helping someone take one manageable step, rather than presenting ten solutions. Work by co-authors Ryan and Deci, and also separately by Sen, suggests as much. Guidance, and help them to reach their next important goal. Clarity of action.
Dignity: research conducted by Hicks, and also independently by White, revealed that addressing musicians’ poverty, insecurity, discrimination, isolation, even poor housing, illness, and lack of meaningful work – not implying that an individual can think their way out of structural problems – adds to wellbeing. Practical help to be paid what is due, without being fleeced or ripped off. Protection from degrading conditions, or criticism from people your music is not for.
Meaning: authors Frankl and Seligman wrote that giving people opportunities to contribute, create, care for others, learn, or work toward something they value provides meaning. Identifying what is unique and culturally significant about their work. Finding people that agree with their vision.
Pleasure and rest: as Hersey and the OECD stated, music, nature, humour, exercise, sleep, food, and small experiences of beauty contribute to rest and pleasure. These do not solve injustice, but they make life more bearable, and sometimes reopen a person’s capacity to act.
What if the music industry put welfare at the heart of itself? Every musical making tool designed to keep a focus on wellbeing and on retaining the joy of music creation.
How would this alternative music creation environment look? Imagine being a musician existing in such a creative environment, configured for wellbeing. How would it feel? Would it encourage you to do your best work? Would you feel more protected?
Imagine being in an audience that is invited to participate in creation, rather than passively consuming it. Would that invitation feel like you were contributing to something with durable significance? Could you feel some shared pride in the resulting art?
Let’s imagine the set of tools that make previously impossible things possible. Each tool answers a “what if” question that couldn’t be asked before.
Let’s envisage an Independent Music Platform – what if getting rewarded fairly, recovering money I am owed, sharing music, getting people to know about my releases, and finding a unique audience for my signature sound, was easy, with a one-stop application?
How about an advanced stem splitting software? Say: PartSplit Pro – what if I could unmix tracks that inspire me, learn from what the masters played, with unprecedented clarity, then deconstruct works to produce graded learning materials based on those parts?
Can we imagine a tool that characterises my unique musical Signature? What if the thousands of tiny micro-decisions I make when creating music could form a clustered pattern that describes my signature musical sound, and helps me refine the originality of my work?
Let’s borrow some concepts from the field of Sentics – what if I could experiment with different emotional treatments of my work, to most accurately convey, in computer sequenced performance, the emotions I want to communicate to an audience?
Imagine we had a tool that replaced the complexity of the mixing studio with a user experience that presented Prominence Mixing – what if you could focus on the management of the soundstage and the musical parts playing in it, instead of worrying about the engineering limitations of outdated mixing technologies and their obsolete user interfaces?
So that I don’t stall in the studio, no matter what my experience level, I could imagine a digital Music Production Assistant – what if I had a tool that could help and encourage me to finish my tracks, that co-operated with the neuroscience of procrastination, not fought against it?
As somebody wrestling with expressing my feelings in song, imagine a Songwriting Assistant tool – what if I had a tool that helped me break writer’s block, or my fear of failure, or helped me get over my feelings of vulnerability and exposure, long enough to write my song?
When I’m feeling lost, lonely and down on myself, if I had an Emotional Support DJ, it could play personalised music to lift my mood again – what if I had something that could, through music, lift me out of imposter syndrome and despair and back to productive confidence, as a musical creator?
A sense-making tool that could help me understand my relationship to the Constellation of music that exists in the world would be great – what if fans could go beyond unhelpful genre descriptions and begin to notice what it is that artists specifically add to their music that makes it appeal most to music fans like me? What if my personal musical taste had measurable dimensions?
I would love to have a tool that helps me take my songs from the studio and prepares me to perform them live – my own pre-performance Soundcheck – what if, having finished and released an original recording, I had a tool that helped me take it to the stage, as a showcase I would be confident and proud of presenting to live audiences?
Imagine a tool that introduced fans to artists in a mutual Handshake – what if I had a tool that let me build a fan database I own independently, throughout my career, which also lets fans find my fan database at the very moment they discover my music, through a music characterisation tool that helps fans home in on what they like most about music, connecting fans with artists?
If I was just starting out as a musician, perhaps even as an adult, I would like a tool to help me Pickup what musicians already know, that I don’t yet, with confidence – what if there was a tool that could help somebody with the intention of creating music, but no previous training in music at all, become a fully-fledged music maker, instead of resorting to prompting a generative AI tool to make music instead?
In designing those tools, let’s consider what makes learning stick. How can people retain what the tools teach?
Songs tell stories. Stories are not decoration on top of civilisation – they are its infrastructure. The clearest statement of this might be:
“Humanity’s greatest technology is not the computer. It is the conversation. Every civilisation is, at its heart, an evolving conversation across generations. Stories are the mechanism. Curiosity is the engine. Wisdom is the direction.”
Music is an important component of that conversation, and the vehicle through which musicians tell their stories. Music is a container of stories and the memory of shared human experience.
A computer amplifies calculation, memory and pattern recognition – but the thing it amplifies is the accumulated conversation of humanity, a conversation that predates silicon by tens of thousands of years and ran, long before it ran on wires, around fires, through songs, and across generations who had never met. Stories, in this view, are compressed packages of experience: a distributed memory system that lets a person who never crossed the ocean or looked through a telescope inherit the lesson anyway. Every storyteller adds one voice to that conversation; every listener becomes its next author.
We can ground these claims in neuroscience, drawn from peer-reviewed sources, identifying four conditions the brain uses to decide whether an experience becomes lasting transformation or evaporates by breakfast.
Full presence – attention is not concentration, it is permission: “permission for experience to become biology.” Research by Kuhl, Tsao and Liu, on 9-month-olds learning Mandarin phonetics from live versus recorded speech, suggests that nothing can be remembered that was never truly experienced.
Genuine challenge – “desirable difficulty.” Too little challenge and the mind drifts; too much and it retreats. Robert Bjork found that between those extremes is where curiosity becomes momentum, and understanding feels earned rather than delivered.
Emotional investment – according to McGaugh, emotion is not frivolous decoration on top of information; it is the signal that tells the brain “this matters, this is worth keeping.” Without feeling, information passes through us like wind through open branches; with feeling, it takes root.
Time on task – Csikszentmihalyi taught that learning is an ongoing relationship, not a single instant. Not fragmented moments. One sustained experience. One unfolding journey. Flow.
The claim that presence, challenge and feeling work better together than in isolation reflects research by van Praag, Kempermann and Gage, on enriched environments, which found – at least in animal models – that combining physical, sensory and cognitive stimulation produces neurobiological changes that no single factor produces alone.
These are biological instructions, not artistic preferences, and that framing holds up against the literature on the neuroscience. That reframing matters: it means a tool that supplies presence, challenge, feeling and sustained time on task isn’t simply well designed. It is working with the grain of how human learning and memory actually function, on the strength of the neuroscientific research.
Of course, none of this pre-supposes or requires music to primarily be a profitable, transactional unit of production. We are not trying to save an industry. We are trying to preserve a human capability.
Here’s what we’re comparing and contrasting the alternative music creation environment with – our current, bleak music industry reality. These are slightly paraphrased quotes, for clarity, of postings by musicians on Threads.
“Non-musicians and non-producers, dazzled by the output of a high-speed, AI-driven, digital plagiarism engine, think they’re about to become pop stars. Because they lack expertise and don’t think they have any alternative, they think it sounds amazing. Now we’re seeing the wave of disappointment and frustration after they’ve entered ‘their’ music into the most competitive, demeaning, and unrewarding commercial business on the planet. In today’s world, music recordings are worth next to nothing as a commercial product. AI-generated recordings are worth even less. When the novelty has worn off, will they lose interest?”
“There are things that generative AI users have been slow to realise. Those with any track record of playing music professionally have had their initial enthusiasm sanded off by years in a hyper-competitive business where, to quote the late Steve Albini, ‘Success means being able to carry on doing what you do.’ They are not in some mutually supportive playgroup. ‘Am I an artist? Is this art?’ is a category of question you leave behind almost immediately. You are just doing what you do and trying to make it work out. Yes, we have mutual respect and recognise the phenomenal talent we sometimes get to share a stage with. But we know that the first great track, the first successful year, the meteoric rise — these things often go nowhere. A lot of that mutual respect is the result of a shared understanding of how ridiculous it is that we continue to choose to do this. As a musician, many resent that they’re forced to care more about content than art, and it’s burning them out to a degree they can’t even describe.”
And in a commentary on the complexion of the music industry, Shannon, the widow of Gregg Allman – who is a beloved Rock & Roll Hall of Fame musician, composer, and multi-instrumentalist – said:
“When he died, people who enabled his addiction and profit off his music got more successful. One even told me he started making three times the amount of dollars he gets per show, playing my husband’s music, the night my husband died. Nine years later, I can say that karma does exist. Justice is served, even when it’s cold, and not how we imagined it. Cruel, evil bullies are miserable, and that misery eats a body and soul alive.”
Which music creation environment would you rather inhabit?
We have it in our power to shift the optimisation function, away from “how much monetary value can we extract from a system?” to “how much potential is trapped inside a system because we designed it to extract, by any brutal, short-term means necessary, rather than to nurture and cultivate?”
We can choose to reframe the music industry as one where musicians and audiences are participants in shared culture, not defined by producer and consumer roles. The aim would be a musical culture the likes of which we have never seen, not a slightly improved version of the current, unsatisfactory one.
We could anchor this to joy, explicitly. The throughline of the whole vision is recapturing the sheer thrill and exhilaration of making music, for the pro and the beginner alike. Making something with your own hands and ears, or truly understanding what you’re hearing and why it moves you, feels good in a way that having either handed to you, finished and polished, does not. Full presence is what lets you notice you’re doing it at all, rather than letting a session pass in the background. Genuine challenge is what makes finishing something feel like it belongs to you, rather than being a given. Emotional investment is why a chord you found yourself, or a mix you finally understand the shape of, stays with you rather than evaporating the moment the audio stops. Sustained time on task is what turns a single good session into an actual relationship with an instrument, a craft, or your own taste.
None of that requires a listener or a maker to be any good, and none of it is available to someone who types a prompt and receives a finished track. That is not a criticism of the people who do it – the appeal of an instant, competent result is obvious – it is a description of what is structurally missing from the transaction: presence, challenge, feeling and time all happened somewhere, but not to the person who asked for the song.
This tool portfolio’s plainest ambition, underneath the neuroscience of learning, is to give that experience back to as many people as will take it: the true beginner who has never made anything before (Pickup); the songwriter stuck on a blank page (Songwriting Assistant) or in a slow, self-doubting week (Emotional Support DJ); the producer who never finished a track (Music Production Assistant); the composer trying to inject different emotional contours into computer sequenced compositions (Sentics); the mixing engineer whose taste was buried under drudgery (Prominence Mixing); the performer whose nerves get between them and the room (Soundcheck); the artist trying to hear their own creative throughline across years of work (Signature); the listener who has only ever been told what to play next, never why it actually moved them (Constellation); and the community connecting both artist and audience, through discovery and shared taste (Handshake).
We have choices we can make. We can put joy and wellbeing at the very heart of music creation.
Act IV – Proof This Isn’t Naïve
If you think there is no strength in joy and wellbeing, consider the Estonian Singing Revolution of 1987 to 1991. Here is the emotional proof-point. A population stood in defiance of a long-time occupier and oppressor with nothing more than their massed voices. Collective music as social infrastructure, identity and resistance. Songs as solidarity. Not entertainment.
I’ve stood in the square where it all happened. My mother was an Estonian. A diaspora Estonian. The restoration of the Estonian culture, its liberty, its history and its musical tradition – all of which were variously suppressed under Soviet rule – were restored, and those of us with Estonian heritage could breathe freely again. Only notes were sung. No shots were fired. The strength of song effected real and durable change, without bloodshed.
A more accommodating and nurturing musical creation environment isn’t a new idea. It’s a very old one that industrial-era music business, and later the digital music business, temporarily overlooked and obscured. The alternative isn’t radical. It’s a return.
And in case you think the traditional folk music of the Estonians was quaint and anachronistic – at a time when women were not permitted to speak or complain – the songs they sung to each other, and in front of their men-folk, were defiant, framing their grievances subtly, in sung verses. It was a way of side-stepping the prohibitions imposed by social conventions and expectations. I learned this on an afternoon at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, walking through their account of the tradition. It was rebellious, authentic and honest.
Today’s music industry is extractive. Extractive systems deplete what they depend on. They’re consumptive. In a systems-thinking sense, the music creation environment could, instead, be regenerative. We see examples of regenerative systems in the maintenance of culture, in forest management and in the fostering of capability. Those systems compound. They take inputs and return outputs in excess of the inputs. We have been managing music, a regenerative asset, as if it were a depleting one.
While generative AI tools have lowered the barriers to non-musicians that wish to participate in the creation of music – which is to be praised – it has lost embodied skill and agency in the process. That’s ultimately a net loss of the human experience of making music. If the machine spits out a song for you, with very little of your involvement and without you learning much from the experience that is durable, it’s like the comparison between learning to cook to professional chef standards, versus popping a TV dinner in the microwave oven. Both produce a meal. But only one will be savoured.
Act V – Dismantling “There’s No Money For This”
In the current, global, neoliberal economic system, people always assume that the obstacle to building new technology is finding the money. The kind of mobile app each tool might be realised as might cost, of the order of, six or seven hundred thousand pounds to develop. Multiply that by perhaps five to successfully bring it to market. A portfolio of a dozen tools might cost seven or eight million just to do the research and development. Sounds like a big number. But in comparison to industry or government standards, or the net annual export earnings of the music industry – which was four point eight billion pounds in 2024, some eight hundred million for recorded music alone – changing the complexion of the music creation environment comes pretty cheaply.
Funding this groundbreaking change in the makeup of the music creation scene might require a portfolio of funding sources. Sources might include public innovation funding, arts and cultural funding, mission-aligned philanthropy, co-operative investment from artists themselves, early enterprise revenue, or even Go Fund Me campaigns.
If the tools we could have reduce fraud, recover money already legally owed to creators, grow exports, and improve the wellbeing of not only the artists – whose wellbeing has been remarked upon as being below average compared to other cohorts – but also of the general music-appreciating public, why wouldn’t we choose, as a society, to create them? Why should a transformative technology, with so many widespread and long-lasting public benefits, be funded any differently to a bridge, or a public health programme?
The real obstacle isn’t capital. There are mountains of it put to dubious, speculative investments, every day. What’s missing is category recognition – which is what this podcast exists to build.
It isn’t about crying, starving artists that feel poorly done by. It’s about creating the climate for better music for all. The point is returning sovereignty over musical culture to the people who make it and appreciate it, not a dwindling number of huge, monopolistic, multi-national corporations.
Act VI – The Ask: This Is a Coalition, Not a Pitch
Let’s state something plainly, for the avoidance of all doubt. In the post-enshittocene world, this portfolio of music creation tools cannot, and should not, be built solely by one person’s company. That would be entrenching a new monopoly to replace the old. It has to be something the music community builds, not something built for it. If the community wishes to have sovereignty over music as a culture, then it needs to support sovereignty over the tools it wishes to use to create that culture.
That’s not to say that every musician needs to become a professional research and development engineer. A coalition with a natural affinity for the subject area, speaking directly to each other, would ideally include independent musicians and producers, composers, music educators, small record labels and live music venues, rights organisations, music technologists, policymakers involved in the arts and culture, and a variety of mission-aligned funders.
As a loose co-operative, the returns might not strictly be limited to a percentage on an investor’s investment, though indications are good that there would be such returns. Policymakers would expect to see a flourishing of the music sector, with growth in outputs and exports. Artists would enjoy greater meaning in their work, not to mention improvements in their wellbeing and mental health, as a cohort. Technologists would add some novel, world-class capabilities, while researching some cutting edge areas of technology in support of neuroscience that has only relatively recently emerged. They would also gain experience in providing for a post-enshittocene business environment. Communities, especially of music fans, would increase their sense of belonging. Participation in building something that changes the world for the better far exceeds the pleasure of extracting another few slim percentage points of profit from an enterprise.
This podcast is not an invitation to “invest.” It’s something different. It’s an invitation to join the conversation, and to commit your knowledge and experience to shaping the music creation tools of tomorrow. It’s an opportunity to share your own story of what’s missing, and to answer the “what-ifs” that you’ve never felt empowered to ask before, as I have done. It’s to help document the losses – such as unclaimed royalties, collection agency data mismatches, income problems as a working musician – or to testify to vanishing music education. The aim is to make the invisible visible, so that we can make the impossible possible.
This podcast has established the beginnings of the narrative. Next, we want to document the evidence. Step three is to form a working coalition of interested parties. Then, we can prototype the tools. And finally we can production-harden them and scale up.
Through this podcast, I’m inviting you into a process that is already underway, not delivering to you a finished pitch. If we do this together, the change we make can be great.
Act VII – Close: The Dream
The joy and excitement of music can be ours again. It’s something achievable at scale, not just through tawdry, exploitative, marketing-deep nostalgia. We can rekindle our dreams and make brand new memories. Favourite contemporary songs can, once again, mark the important milestones of our lives forever. You and your friends, with a few guitars and some bravado, will be able to form a band, play a gig and have the audience sing along with the songs you played. Dancing will come back into style, as we realise the benefits of somatic movement on our moods, stress-levels, physical bodies and nervous systems. People can have fun together in a post-enshittocene enclave – a haven against the wider enshittocene world, still struggling to be born. We can envisage listening parties for the latest artist releases. We can nurture and rebuild musical communities. We can build an environment that feels familiar. That feels like it’s ours. Together, we can give millions of people meaning.
We are not trying to save an industry. We are trying to preserve a human capability. A precious one. One that we’d miss, if it was ever gone.
It’s early days. So please, in the next 24 hours, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Join our nascent mailing list by mailing info@confelicityrecords.com (Confelicity Records is all one word). Tell us your own “what’s missing” story.
If there is enough interest, in future episodes of this podcast, we’ll talk more about the funding models in detail. We’ll outline the specific tools I’ve mentioned and how they work. With some luck and goodwill, we’ll have conversations with artists already living the extraction problem, we’ll dive into the policy and coalition-building path, and perhaps highlight some of the “what’s missing” stories you send in.
We know that anything that can’t go on forever will stop. But when? The only question is whether we help build what comes next, or wait for it to happen to us. The choice is ours.
I’ve been Michael Topic, and you’ve been listening to the Post-Enshittocene Music Manifesto.
Subscribe, share this with someone who still remembers why they picked up an instrument, and tell us your own “what’s missing” story: info@confelicityrecords.com
Cover art: Clare Topic – Copyright 2026 – All rights reserved.
