First, I was curious to know if Google ripped this guy off. I could only find his song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM4zNN-PxU https://www.youtube.com/watc

First, I was curious to know if Google ripped this guy off. I could only find his song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM4zNN-PxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM4zNN-PxU) not the Google ad. But, as a (amateur) musician myself, I don't think there is much to the chord progression. It sounds like a thousand other songs - the lyrics and delivery are what make this song unique and good. Second, incredibly well-written. Very persuasive. Third, it's been clear for a long time music was going to only get harder to succeed in, for the sole reason that as time goes on you are competing with the entirety of music history. Your recorded music is competing with everything ever recorded, Beatles, 80's glam rock, Mozart, and rain forest nature sounds. (Live music has magic, yes, but people are getting immune to it.) Fourth, the 60's-00's was a golden era where technology made it just barely possible to record and distribute music, in a way that required a lot of labor. That labor made it more collaborative, and served as a kind of distributed gate-keeper to the market. Now, technology is too good, and unless an EMP pulse from a solar flare or nuke destroys all digital recordings of everything, it's not going to turn back. Fifth, I think the solution is to embrace and extend the modern trends. Get people to collaborate with you on stage using their cell phones. As a performer, connect your phone to the PA, then run a webserver that people in the audience can access over the local subnet. They can then affect the sound in arbitrary ways (perhaps most simply by making beats).