Putin Bombs Music.

In lockdown I turned to Youtube to improve my music education. People like Rick Beato and Adam Neely are amazing (human) musicians with an honest desire to pass on musical knowledge. They are now both livid (my word) at Universal Music Corporation who police their ownership rights by taking down any video containing snippets of existing players and songs in a Putin-esc land grab for territory. Their weapons are algorithms that analyse audio to spot facsimiles. At college I read textbooks from our long history of scientists and mathematicians daily but as music exists as sound, once it stops there’s nothing, silence. Great players, singers and song writers exist in their performances and without hearing those leaves a huge hole in education. And UMC’s algorithms aren’t perfect either. But Universal Music Corporation has a bank of lawyers and money enough to kill any counter claims, the other weapon in their armoury. Like libel law these two weapons in combination become unchallengeable to lesser mortals. This will become the universal powerlessness of us all. Forget government and the law they’re outdated and hopelessly slow being human based. An algorithm will have you in court quicker than your solicitor can pick up a pen and who’ll likely advise you have zero chance of winning anyway and losing will take everything you own. We humans are already behind the curve and it can only get worse. Aspiring musicians will not be allowed to hear these works in an educational context and without it know only the basic rudiments and create our future music in that fashion. Already current music is unengaging, elevator music’s elevator music and it’s likely future music will be created by algorithms to avoid paying a (human) creator’s royalties. It’s a farcical example of shooting oneself in the foot when the Universal Music Corporation curates the universal death of music. I’m livid too.