Adam Robinson is a high finance investment guru and a former chess prodigy. I discovered him on a recent podcast by ubermensch Tim Ferriss. Robinson’s work has no apparent connection to the music industry, but he seems like an interesting and clever guy. When asked about his investment philosophies, he has said he looks for situations where people will say, “It doesn’t make sense.” It is there, he claims, that opportunities lie.

Hi Adam, we are the music industry. And… well… the thing is you see… it doesn’t really make sense.

• A business can purchase an advertisement before/beside an online video of a song to get its message out to the listeners of that song. The video hosting website can receive income that is an unfair multiple of what the rights holder of that song will receive. It doesn’t make sense.

• Music fans want music like never before, they want to support the music makers they love, and they want the convenience of having their music wherever they are. These elements do not have to be mutually exclusive, but presently that’s how they often are. It doesn’t make sense.

• The downloading/streaming of pirated and unpaid for music creates huge demand for internet connections and data providers. This helps generate vast income for business, but nothing for the creators of that music. It doesn’t make sense.

• We live in the era of the database and the algorithm. Anyone can punch a phrase into a search engine and, within seconds, find millions of iterations of that exact phrase all over the web. Yet knowing where a song was used, and tracking down the rights holder, can be incredibly difficult. It doesn’t make sense.

From comfort to excitement, from sadness to glee, music makers feel, capture, and convey emotion. A world without their music would be a far emptier place. Imagine if the songwriters, producers, and music makers of the world removed all of their work from everything for 3 months. How attractive would that smart phone be if it couldn’t play music? Would streaming services make it through the quarter? How would internet and mobile data providers be hit if their networks no longer had music, and the soundtracks were removed from every downloaded film and TV series?

Perhaps Robinson’s ‘opportunity’ lies in what happens next. All these different problems and paths are converging towards a point on the horizon that no one can quite see yet. It feels like we are the 90s kid with the CD player, the phone, the camera, the gameboy, and the laptop being carted around in our backpack… while the iPhone is just around the corner. Before we reach that point, our opportunity is to come to a fair deal for music makers. I hope we get there soon, because at the moment – it doesn’t make sense.