Solve the biggest challenges of our time through music with this groundbreaking guide by globally recognized thought leader in music, culture and urban policy Shain Shapiro.Music can address and help solve the biggest challenges of our time. This book shows you how: through personal stories, case studies, and interviews, this is a new kind of music book – not about any genre or discipline, but about music as a form of resilience, and one that will appeal to any reader looking to take action to fight the biggest challenges that we face.
Through the six biggest political and social challenges of our time, learn how music can improve our lives, no matter where we live, with each chapter offering specific actions to use music as a tool to address and solve problems.
- Government and diplomacy: discover how music can accelerate economic diversification and support development. If we rethink music as an economic good, we can address extreme poverty and create sustainable jobs.
- The climate emergency: understand how music can speed up energy transition and fight climate denialism, and how minor changes can be made to reduce music's impact on the environment.
- Migration: explore music's ability to create more opportunities for newcomers and accelerate integration.
- Technology: Music has always been one of the first art forms to be disrupted by technological advancements, and AI is no different. See how music can protect and expand human creativity as AI develops.
- Our health: with music as one of the cheapest and best therapies available, learn how it can support healthy ageing, preventative healthcare and mental health across society.
- Inequality and disinformation: as a community-builder, music can be an apolitical way to facilitate communication with each other, so that collectively we can make the world a better place.
Music has always been a shared ground through history, and now it can be a galvanizing force for change when we need it most.
Solve the biggest challenges of our time through music with this groundbreaking guide by globally recognized thought leader in music, culture and urban policy Shain Shapiro.
Can music save the world?
After twenty years working with governments around the world, music thought leader Shain Shapiro come to a surprising conclusion: music isn't entertainment. It's infrastructure. Like roads or clean water, music quietly supports society every day. We only notice its importance when something starts to fail. And today, two things are failing.
The music we consume privately - “my music” songs, played through streaming services and in our headphones - does far more neurological, social and economic work than we recognise. Meanwhile the music we make together, “our music” - the choir, the jam session, the lullaby, the funeral song - is decaying and disappearing. As shared musical experiences decline, so do the trust, connection and the shared practice of listening to one another that collective life depends on.
How Music Can Save the World travels from Lagos and Bogotá to schools, care homes and communities across Europe, exploring what happens when we treat music as what it demonstrably is: one of humanity's most powerful forms of social infrastructure.
The world has more music than ever, it is also, in the ways that matter, less musical. This book is about why that matters and how we need to use music to address the biggest problems we face.
