1. PARASITE: DEEP DIVE
Something has taken hold. The music industry, once nourished by raw expression, is now suffocated by systems designed to consume rather than create. Algorithms, metrics, and trends cling like an alien growth - inseparable from their host, yet draining it of vitality.
The parasite thrives in numbers: clicks, streams, followers, charts. It thrives in repetition, in predictability, in the safe reproduction of what has already worked. Music is no longer asked to move or transform us - it is asked to perform. To deliver three seconds of attention. To slot neatly into a playlist. To become disposable the moment it appears.
But music was not born to be content. It was not meant to be bent into the shape of data, shrunk down to an algorithmic fragment. At its core, music is untamed - a cry, a confession, a rebellion, a ritual. It resists the silence of existence. It gives us something ineffable: the pulse of another human being captured in sound.
History tells us this. Long before streams and sales, music carried memory and survival. It was sung around fires, chanted in protest, played in secret when silence was demanded. It fuelled revolutions, stitched communities together, and gave voice to the voiceless. Songs outlived their singers, passing from mouth to mouth, unbought and unmeasured. In those forms, music’s power was undeniable, because it was inseparable from the human need to speak, to grieve, to rejoice.
The danger of the parasite is not only in what it consumes, but in how it reshapes its host. Artists adapt to survive: crafting with one eye on the algorithm, writing with fear of irrelevance, performing for visibility rather than meaning. The host learns to live for the parasite, until it can no longer remember its own vitality.
And this is not only music’s story. Across culture, the parasite thrives. Films built for franchises. Books tailored to trends. Art turned into brand. Even our attention is fractured into units to be counted, measured, and sold. Creativity itself is in danger of becoming a resource stripped of spirit - endlessly produced, rarely lived.
Disposable Music prototypes for YOU FEEL IT and BLEAK
This is the cost: a culture where songs are drained of soul, where originality feels like risk, where music is immobilised even as it multiplies. We are left with the husk of an art form - prolific, accessible, everywhere, yet somehow hollow.
Beneath the weight of systems that measure and consume, the possibility of genuine music remains. A melody that resists calculation, a voice that refuses optimisation, a sound that exists for no one but itself. These are the moments that remind us the parasite doesn’t hold all the power.
PARASITE is a warning, but also a call. It asks us to look beyond the systems that drain and remember why music ever mattered. If music is truly becoming disposable, stripped of permanence, the question becomes unavoidable: do we lose meaning — or do we gain a new freedom?