Against cultural indifference: for the dignity of those who create

My music is being released this week on all platforms except Spotify, as a wake-up call. Not only in response to what we now know about the financing of military technology—using money that never reaches the creators whose work their business model feeds on—but also as a reminder to everyone who claims to love music while refusing to take responsibility for how they consume it, or to acknowledge the rights and freedoms of the artists who dedicate their lives to making the world a kinder place amid the difficulties and challenges we face, individually and collectively, across the planet.

It is also a call directed at artists themselves, encouraging them to learn to respect their own work and to reflect on the boundaries we still resist establishing as a collective—boundaries weakened by inconsistency, inherited from a long tradition of dependence and lack of autonomy, both professionally and personally. This is something conservatories and higher education institutions consistently fail to address with the clarity it requires.

It is equally a call to cultural managers who accept the idea that the way forward is to sell yourself in exchange for nothing, or to operate within a system that expects you to become just another cog in its machinery, without ever questioning what sustainability or developmental management should actually mean for an industry that must decide what it wants to be—beyond commercial interest—if it truly intends to care for what we genuinely love and call Culture.

Too often, adopting a narrative without questioning it—whether by promoters, programmers, or cultural managers—reveals how far the sector still has to go in terms of real professionalization, in all its layers, diversities, and essential complementary disciplines.

Being able to press keys is not enough. The sector has postponed its own professionalization for far too long—decades—and now it must either face the consequences or rebuild with coherence. There is a profound lack of leadership, and an incapacity to make the world of business an ally—an ally, not an executioner, but a partner.