Beyond Entertainment: What Antarctic Explorers and Holocaust Survivors Knew About Music's Power.
As I plan for 2025, Simon Sinek's challenge to "start with why" resonates deeply with me. In an industry where musicians often struggle while others profit from their creativity, understanding our deeper purpose becomes crucial. Yes, there are easier and more lucrative career paths. I've chosen to dedicate my career to supporting artists because of one fundamental truth: music isn't a nice to have luxury, it's essential for human survival and well being.
History provides a lot of compelling evidence of music's role in human resilience. Think of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition (1914-1917). Despite facing extreme cold, starvation, and isolation, the crew maintained one seemingly impractical item among their carefully rationed supplies: Leonard Hussey's banjo. Shackleton called it "vital mental medicine," recognizing that survival demanded more than just physical sustenance.
This pattern of preserving music in the face of extreme adversity appears consistently across the human experience. During the 900 day siege of Leningrad, as bombardments and famine decimated the city, Dmitri Shostakovich composed and premiered his seventh symphony with an orchestra of starving musicians. In World War II ghettos and concentration camps, Jewish musicians kept their instruments despite unimaginable conditions. During the apartheid era in South Africa, freedom fighters carried small instruments and sang protest songs that gave them strength. On D-Day, Piper Bill Millin provided courage to advancing troops, playing his bagpipes on Sword Beach as bullets flew past.
Music's power extends beyond immediate survival into cultural preservation and unification. Native American Powwows have become vital spaces for healing and maintaining traditions, especially during periods of cultural suppression. During the antebellum South, slaves preserved their musical traditions, using them for spiritual strength and as a sophisticated system for covert communication. Irish emigrants during the Potato Famine carried fiddles and tin whistles aboard overcrowded "coffin ships," choosing to preserve their cultural heritage even as they fled starvation.
The impact of these preservation efforts is felt today. Our modern musical landscape, across all genres, stands as a testament to this cultural legacy, with each generation of musicians building upon the foundations laid by the people that came before them.
Today's music industry often misses this deeper significance, reducing art to metrics like streaming numbers, ticket sales, and celebrity status, while overlooking music's fundamental role in our lives. Yes the music business is about business, but this narrow focus on metrics has created an unsustainable ecosystem where artists struggle to make a living while others profit from their work. The problem extends beyond economics; when we fail to support musicians adequately, we risk undermining our society’s resilience.
My mission is rooted in a simple truth: if people throughout history chose to preserve instruments and make music even in life-or-death situations, we must also ensure musicians can thrive in times of prosperity. This isn't only about helping artists achieve commercial success, it's about protecting an essential human resource. When we support artists, we're investing in our collective future and ensuring this resource continues to sustain and inspire generations to come.
Building a better future for music hinges on reshaping the industry to prioritize its creators. Artists should be empowered to lead their own careers, defining success on their own terms. We need new business models that ensure fair compensation and foster creative environments where artists can thrive. As Sinek suggests, when you understand your "why," everything else falls into place. My purpose is clear: to protect and nurture the creators of this vital mental medicine.