Ted Gioia: Music As A Cultural Storage Medium

What people don’t understand is that, for most of history, music was a kind of cloud storage for societies. I like to tell people that music is a technology for societies that don’t have semiconductors or spaceships. If you go to any traditional community, and you try to find the historian, generally it’s a singer. Music would preserve culture; it would preserve folklore. Well, nowadays, we rely on cloud storage to be the preserver of these same things. And I think there’s a strange shift. – Medium