Music is not just entertainment. It is infrastructure — as foundational to human life as roads, water and power, and just as invisible when it works. In bold, accessible and personal terms, Shain Shapiro shows how music can create jobs in the world's youngest countries, cut healthcare costs, decarbonise cities, rebuild communities after crisis and restore the collective capacity this century demands. The problem is not the music. It is that almost nowhere on Earth is music measured, funded or governed as what it demonstrably is.

Drawing on stories from a refugee settlement in Northern Uganda to a taxi in Riyadh, from Colombia's four‑decade experiment in music and recovery to his own family's story of illness, grief and the songs that carried them through, How Music Can Save The World is both an argument and a plan for anyone who, like Shain, loves and cherishes music and couldn’t live without it.