Disruption as Contingency: Music, Blockchain, Wtf?

The “disruptive” effect of emergent technologies has come to signify the promise of a better world, fuelled by unforeseen efficiencies in production and business; thus, the digital strategist Don Tapscott’s enthusiasm that blockchain, a quintessentially disruptive technology, will “make it rain” (Tapscott, 2016) for musical creatives, by increasing revenue from digital content. This chapter will draw on Joshua Gans’ The Disruption Dilemma, which discusses disruption in terms of market ecosystems, and After Finitude, where Quentin Meillassoux formulates a new paradigm for addressing the contingency that underpins human knowledge, and thereby offers a reconfiguration of disruption as a fundamentally contingent force.