A few weeks ago, I found myself in Hard Rock Café listening to a band of aging men with beer bellies and graying hair (if they still had any) belting out the hits of my parent’s college days. From the audience, songs like “Awitin Mo Isasayaw Ko” and “Sumayaw, Sumunod” rang out in chorus.

This wasn’t some second-rate show band that couldn’t bring themselves to move on from yesteryear’s radio hits. Made up of a spattering of members from bands like VST&Co. and Wadab, these were the people your mothers would scream about from the concert stands back in the good old days.

When our generation is having throwback concerts of our own, will they too be carried by our nostalgia for the local music of our era? Judging by the state of our local music industry today, it’s highly unlikely.

Now, before the defensive OPM fans take to the comments section to attack my clearly ill-founded opinion, I’ll point out that they can’t pull rank here. In what has become a go-to rebuttal, they argue that people with opinions like mine probably don’t try hard enough to get past the Western music on YouTube and 8tracks to find local acts of note.

But because I frequent gigs and I’ve heard local bands, believe me that I doubt neither their existence nor their talent.

I mourn for the state of local music not because it has died out, but because it’s largely been relegated to an underground, almost obscure cultural scene reserved for people who make an effort to find it. In my opinion, the problem this reveals is not that people have become too attached to Western music (though that can’t just be ruled out either).

Rather, I believe it reveals a significant structural problem that local music fans should be eager to discuss, not hurried to deny. In the 1970s, there was no shortage of funding for the arts—one of the few aspects of the Marcos dictatorship we ought to be grateful for. According to the 1970s artists that I had to interview for my sociology thesis on Manila Sound, there was also a presidential decree that required the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas to play a certain number of local songs per hour of radio time, boosting the popularity of local musicians to unprecedented levels.

These days, however, government funding for the arts has taken a backseat. Yet another rebuttal of OPM zealots is that this shouldn’t be a problem for the musicians of our generation anyway. We have what the music gods of yesteryear never had the privilege of having: The Internet.

While this is true, should we simply accept that the existence of social media accounts make it acceptable for our local music producers and record labels to pass on real talent for the next passable pop star? As Political Science Department instructor Leloy Claudio wrote in his controversial GMA article, “Take the argument to its logical conclusion: If you don’t make it, poor padawan, it’s nobody’s fault but yours… If you lack support, it’s because you didn’t tweet enough.”

There’s also the issue of piracy. I admit to having no moral high ground here, as I’m as much a fan of torrents as the next millennial. But in my thesis interview, Jim Paredes and Snaffu Rigor both pointed to piracy as a key culprit in the decline of our local music industry. With open-source sites, we’ve effectively diminished our musicians’ chances of long-term career security.

There will always be good bands that play at places like Route 196 and SaGuijo. But it ought to unsettle us that frequent gigs and posts on SoundCloud can be considered an acceptable alternative to structural change in support of our arts.