This UNDP Development Futures Series policy brief explores the potential of leveraging cultural and creative industries, especially through music, to assist in the recovery from crisis and post-crisis settings. It focuses on music, not to elevate it above other art forms, but because engaging with it provides lessons and tactics, understanding and benefits across all other performative art forms and forms of intellectual property (IP). This study emphasizes the pivotal role of music and cultural participation and its engagement as a coping strategy, adding resilience to affected communities, and the expansive impact of music if it is regarded as an economy and an ecosystem. The policy brief proposes an innovative approach: to incorporate music and cultural production into programmes and strategies to support affected communities for livelihood recovery. The objective is to explore how music, and the wider creative economy, can be a powerful tool in supporting economic diversification in a non-extractive manner, by leveraging potential passive income streams inherent in music and cultural intellectual property.