Here is a reply from my beautiful friend Maeve Rose who lives in Copenhagen not on Steemit:

Thanks for sharing. Reading this made me think a lot about the relationship between the environment and our bodies: how the things we consume - including what we feed our minds - have a direct influence on us, how we feel and develop. Modern music fills me with dis-ease.

Coca-cola is a very fitting metaphor for modern music: "A useless product that has no nutritional value (it actually causes disease) that has become an international cultural icon..." Modern music is packaged and sold as a complete product. It's cheap, oddly familiar, and addictive. Quantity over quality, width over depth.

Traditional songs, on the other hand, change over time. Old songs are shaped by the minds and hands of several generations of anonymous musicians who each imprint a part of their own struggles and their own stories onto the artwork. There's a subliminal, grounded and nourishing quality to it that's difficult to replicate. The music is living, it's pruned and cared for like a tree, and it's never really 'complete', because it's tool for storytelling that is meant to grow and be passed on. Over time, a song can come up again in several forms, barely recognisable, but connected at the root to a single source, ready to be shaped by new musicians.

Copyright is supposed to protect the rights of artists and musicians, but as you mentioned, more often than not it's being used to protect the interest of companies, the middlemen, the 'procurers'. A modern, popular musician is asked to play the role of a prostitute more than a artist. Selling something: a worthless product. Their role is to repeat and perpetuate the ideals of modern culture in a way that seemingly feels as 'edgy' as music was 50 years ago. These 'prostitutes' don't have a say or a hand in creating the songs, they're often a victim of their environment and as oblivious as the consumer. Fame is a mechanism to rise an individual up in order to make the product known.

Platforms like Spotify make a killing off of 'loaning out' songs for cheap, often without the consumer realising it (since it's a subscription business model). Free platforms like YouTube turn a profit through advertising, sponsorship, and by suggesting new videos based on the data they've already collected, keeping listeners hooked and stuck on the website. This phenomenon brings to mind a line I heard a lot when listening to various individuals talk about cyber security over the years: "If a product is free, then YOU are the product."

We should be wary of the things we put into our bodies and minds. As if I needed another reason to dislike and distrust modern music; you've illustrated exactly what it is that modern music does and what exactly it wants to capitalize on. The mind. The only logical thing to do is to acknowledge it, to avoid the mainstream and to look elsewhere for creative nourishment. There are hundreds of thousands of musicians who create for the love of creating. Even if you listened to each song back to back, all day every day, and until the end of your life, you would never hear it all. It's those people who are worth listening to. That in and of itself is a beautiful thing.

The desire to never be forgotten is the desire for immortality, or power over death. The irony is that spending too much time building something (physical or mental) to be remembered by can make us forget to live. That's why it's so important for the act of creating to be a fulfilling act, enriching and euphoric. A moment lived, a moment captured.