Ryuichi Sakamoto interview

Check out this very interesting Guardian UK interview with Ryuichi Sakamoto where he offers his thoughts on the future of the music industry.

Here are a few tidbits:

1. For the last 100 years, only a few organisations have dominated the music world and ripped off both fans and creators. But this is an exceptional circumstance that has only existed in the last century. It started at the end of the 19th century, so if we look at human history it is a very exceptional point.

2. In the old days people shared music, they didn’t care who made it; a song would be owned by a village and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now with the internet we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.

3. It is hard to truly divide music from noise. When you are listening to a record you are hearing noise and music at the same time, but your brain splits them in two. You hear one but you are listening to both. My concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise.