How Music Can
Save The World

by Shain Shapiro

Out 9 February 2027 · Hardback & audiobook
Duncan Baird Publishing / Penguin Random House

Pre-order in the UK →
Pre-orders globally →

After twenty years working with governments around the world, music thought leader Shain Shapiro came to a surprising conclusion: music isn’t entertainment. It’s infrastructure. Like roads or clean water, music quietly supports society every day. We only notice its importance when something starts to fail. And today, two things are failing.

The music we consume privately – “my music” songs, played through streaming services and in our headphones – does far more neurological, social and economic work than we recognise. Meanwhile the music we make together, “our music” – the choir, the jam session, the lullaby, the funeral song – is decaying and disappearing. As shared musical experiences decline, so do the trust, connection and the shared practice of listening to one another that collective life depends on.

How Music Can Save the World travels from Lagos and Bogotá to schools, care homes and communities across Europe, exploring what happens when we treat music as what it demonstrably is: one of humanity’s most powerful forms of social infrastructure.

The world has more music than ever; it is also, in the ways that matter, less musical. This book is about why that matters and how we need to use music to address the biggest problems we face.

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Praise for
How Music Can Save The World

  • “Music is more than entertainment. It is social infrastructure—a fundamental source of creativity, connection, and community. Shain Shapiro shows how music builds trust, brings people together, and makes our cities and societies work better—and what we stand to lose as the experience of making music together recedes from our lives. How Music Can Save the World is a big, provocative, and hopeful book about something we all love and badly need.”

    Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

  • “We are living through a crisis of disconnection, from the planet and from each other. This book is a reminder that music is something we do together, and that doing it together is how change starts.”

    Tori Tsui, climate justice activist and author of It’s Not Just You

  • “For years I've argued that music's value is undervalued and what we don't count, we don't protect. Shain Shapiro takes that argument further than anyone. This is a book about infrastructure: the tracks, the rules, the money, and why building them properly is how music improves everyone’s lives. Clear-eyed, evidence-rich, stubbornly practical. Read it, then go and make the world a better place.”

    Tom Gray, Chair, IVORS Academy and Musician, Gomez

  • “Across schools, workplaces, healthcare settings, and communities, music is being used to strengthen relationships, support wellbeing, and foster belonging. How Music Can Save The World makes the case for seeing music as infrastructure: an important resource that can help individuals and communities become healthier, better connected, and more resilient.”

    Susan Magsamen, Author, Your Brain on Art: How The Arts Transform Us

  • “Music's power is personal and private. It is the listener's emotional voice. Shain Shapiro's How Music Can Save The World is a polemic against those who regard music as a fashion accessory or the odd quirk of a gifted few. This book argues for restoring music to its rightful place as a universal human trait whose practitioners (ideally, all of us) should nurture, cherish, and promote its well-being for our own sake. Amen to that!”

    Susan Rogers, Author, This Is What It Sounds Like and Prince’s Studio Engineer

  • “Shain Shapiro’s new book has us thinking about music differently. Not just as entertainment, not just culture and certainly not just business. He expands the frame massively, to examine music as infrastructure - as part of the fabric of life, family, communities, cities, countries and yes, the world. An ambitious manifesto and thesis about what music is and what it does for us, humans the world over, in this life together. As inspiring as your favourite song.”

    Keith Jopling, Author, The Song Sommelier and Body of Work

  • “For centuries, music has helped mobilize millions of people to demand action on everything from climate change to ending extreme poverty. But in this compelling book, Shain Shapiro makes the case for treating music not simply as a megaphone for change, but as a powerful driver of economic opportunity, job creation, and the trust and connections that hold communities together. And who better to make that case than someone who has advised more than 100 governments and cities on how to harness the power of music?”

    Michael Sheldrick, Co-Founder, Global Citizen and Author, From Ideas to Impact

  • “A brilliant and innovative treatise, explaining in myriad detail how this can be achieved and how each and every one of us can contribute. A lighthearted tribute to the ways in which music impacts our lives.”

    Rikki Stein, Fela Kuti’s Manager and author, Moving Music

  • “We spend most of our lives experiencing music as either entertainment or business, but Shapiro reminds us in How Music Can Save the World that it is much more than that. In fact, it's fundamental to what makes us human. Remembering that can change not only how we understand songs but how we understand one another.”

    Chris Dalla Riva, Author, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves

  • “A problem with music is that we mostly take it for granted. Like birdsong, only in its absence might we truly value the currency of its presence. And so, we take music for granted. Yet, as Shain Shapiro points out in How Music Can Save the World, not only is music good for our individual souls and collective communities, but it is also key infrastructure for building a good society. Policy makers take note!”

    Lord Kevin Brennan of Canton

Also by Shain Shapiro
This Must Be The Place: How Music Can Make Your City Better

Read more →