I hate to say it but I think society is pretty full up on creativity these days. If the richest 1000 musicians stopped composing, would there be no music? Would it be worse than what we have now?
Point of view is everything. From at least one point of view the answer is yes.
Say I'm a small unsigned singer/songwriter, grinding along looking for a break. I write one good song. Elvis hears my song, and is free to just perform it himself. No copyright, no payment to me. His release is a smash hit, making him millions.
His performance of the song contributes a lot to his success, but the song itself is valuable too.
Of course elvis is signed by a record label, who pays him. The other record label buys one CD, and copies it (as they are entitled to do - no copyright remember.) they make millions selling it cheap (no need to spend on artists or marketing.) In fact they have a chain of stores where you can by any CD ever at half price.
So the real winner here is the person who sells to the customer, and pays not a penny upstream.
Musicians and song writers and audience builders upstream all work in construction doing their day job, and the cream of that crop can't afford to spend much time on creating. Their secret sauce is lost, and we are all poorer because of that.
Which personally, for me, sounds like a much worse system.
