While this isn’t purely video game related, we are sadden by the recent passing of Ryuichi Sakamoto. His death, along with his former bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi also passing earlier this year, is a giant loss to the music and video game world. YMO and Sakamoto’s solo work had a major influence on some of your favorite pop charts, video game and even movie soundtracks. Some say it was YMO, Kraftwerk, and even Bruce Haack we have to thank for inventing Electronic Music as we know it.

He will be greatly missed.

As archivists and preservationists ourselves, we found this quote from Sakamoto himself insightful, and it would be fitting to let him have the last word:

For the last 100 years, only a few organisations have dominated the music world and ripped off both fans and creators. But this is an exceptional circumstance that has only existed in the last century. It started at the end of the 19th century, so if we look at human history it is a very exceptional point.

In the old days people shared music, they didn’t care who made it; a song would be owned by a village and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now with the internet we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.