Music is a gift, and in more ways than one. But it took me decades to understand what that actually means. I studied the anthropology of gift exchange back in grad school, a few years before Lewis Hyde’s book was published. But I really didn’t grasp its full significance back then. (As you have seen, this is a recurring theme of this article, namely the ways my preconceptions made it harder for me to understand what these books had to offer.) Back then, the best source of information on gifting as a social practice was an antiquated study by Marcel Mauss from 1925, which made these exchanges seem like a bizarre departure from accepted norms, and possibly even destructive (as in the potlatch ritual of the Pacific Northwest). But Hyde, who published his book in 1983, helped me understand that gift exchanges were much more important than economists and cultural historians lead us to believe. In particular, I gradually came to grasp that talented musicians often struggle because, as gifted peopled, they tend to view their songs in this light. They are punished for building their vocation on gift exchanges in a society that wants to treat everything on a transaction basis. I’d even claim that the biggest problem with the music ecosystem today is the dominance of platforms (YouTube, TikTok, etc.) that pretend to be gift exchanges, but really aren’t. Hyde provides invaluable tools for understanding and addressing this tragic mismatch.