Orphan Songs

I’m releasing a song called ”Not made to last” to help raise awareness about one of the many flaws of the monetary-market system: ”Planned obsolecense” – or ”why products are not made to last”. The song is intentionally kind of naive and educational in its form. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to make it catchy as hell.

But why am I releasing an up-beat pop song with seemingly blunt lyrics about this ”boring” topic? Well, first of all I’m fed up with new products which break or stop working far too soon. Today, the phrase ”high quality” seems to have almost nothing to do with the durability of a product – instead it has more to do with nice features or a pleasant user experience. Also, most products today cannot be repaired or upgraded. But why is this?

Everywhere you go there are cheap, poorly designed products with short lifespans for sale. We buy them. They break. We throw them away. Then we have to go out and buy the same inferior products again and again and again. But hey! According to our current economic model, this is actually considered ”good”. Ever heard of ”economic growth”, or a ”rise in GDP”? This is of course totally devestating to the environment as we keep creating more and more waste (often toxic). The root cause is our monetary-market system. It is basically encouraging us to thrash this planet asap in the name of profit. And most people are in ignorance about how the system actually works or they just don’t care.

I believe the global socio-economic system must and will change. Either people will wake up and and revolutionize the system from within or we will see a total collapse of the old system. The latter seems more likely, but I hope for a smooth transition. This song is a humble contribution to that process.

I can’t possibly give a full picture of the problem here. I could go on some more, but I won’t. I’m happy if you just listen to the song. Perhaps it will inspire you to learn more about how the economic system works. Perhaps you will disagree with the song’s message and write me an angry email. Or perhaps you don’t understand a word of English and just feel like dancing when you listen to it (like my two kids).

If you are interested in learning more about this issue, I recommend the following clips. The first one is from ”The story of stuff”. It only deals with electronics, but the problem is, of course, much bigger than that.
The Story of Electronics (2010)

The second one is from ”Zeitgeist: Moving Forward”, the 3rd Zeitgeist film.
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (Planned Obsolescence)

Thanks to Martin Johansson (Anikee) for excellent bass playing.
Thanks also to all the writers, film makers, philosophers, designers, bloggers etc. who inspired me to write this. Something tells me this is not my last activist song. But hey, don’t forget to enjoy it! I’d much rather bob my head through the revolution than angrily shake my fist.

”Not built to last” is released under the Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0). Share, re-record, make videos or whatever you’d like, but give credit to Orphan Songs and link to www.orphansongs.com when possible.