Changing the course of musical history

[Frosteater]

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It wasn't simply the songs they put out, it was the relevant, timeless lyrics they put into their songs. Some "time-traveler" couldn't accomplish this on advanced knowledge alone.

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Which is especially true if you consider that people actually don't care at all if a song is "new" or not. Your typical scale in music has 8 notes you can build chords on and some combinations are really pleasant for the human ear and the typical guy next door who just listens to music for fun and recreation just isn't trained to actually spot the similarities. For example, if you somehow arrived in the 50s there wouldn't be much difference if you recorded The Beatles' Let It Be, With Or Without You from U2 or just wrote your own song with the same chords (which countless artists do even today, anyway), since it's pretty much the same from a theoretical point of view.

When you think about it, that just makes the whole Johnny Be Good scene from Back To The Future even more ironic, since we're talking about a standard blues line here which has been done to death during that time and has been picked up regularly later.

So ...

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But would you feel guilty? Could you enjoy this music knowing that someone else should have made it?

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You can be sure I couldn't care less.
Just like the majority of today's musicians don't care while doing basically the same.