Time & Perspective Quote by Maynard James Keenan

Maynard James Keenan isn’t offering a utopian prediction so much as a blunt market correction: the industry can implode, formats can die, algorithms can flood the zone, but desire is stubborn. The line is almost aggressively simple, a refusal to romanticize music as salvation or to catastrophize it as a doomed art. “Still” does a lot of work here. It implies we’ve been through a scare - piracy panic, streaming’s race-to-the-bottom payouts, AI mimicry, touring becoming the real paycheck - and that the obvious conclusion (“music is finished”) is also the laziest.

Keenan’s intent feels less like reassurance than like grounding. He’s a musician who has lived through multiple economic regimes of music, and he’s pointing to the only stable constant: demand. Not “people need music” (a sacred claim), but “people want music” (a human one). Want is messy, commercial, fickle, and real. It acknowledges that taste is shaped by culture and tech, but it also argues those forces can’t erase the appetite they exploit.

The subtext is a quiet jab at gatekeepers and doomers alike. If the future of music depends on anyone, it’s not labels, platforms, or tastemakers; it’s listeners doing what they’ve always done: seeking rhythm, catharsis, identity, noise. Keenan’s cynicism is practical: the business model will keep mutating because the impulse it feeds isn’t going anywhere.