In this year end reflection, Alec and Nick discuss the folkloric figure of Pinocchio—a "constantly lying wooden marionette," whose dual consciousness (as both an abject dummy and an aspiring human) suggests a parable for understanding musical problems of "liveness" and "deadness" and the puppetry of musical commodification. Taking up Carlo Collodi's late 19th century series "The Adventures of Pinocchio" as a text that precodes social and political movements in the 20th century—including local and global perspectives of artisan class-politics, Marxism, Italian unification, and fascism—the conversation follows into an analysis of the puppet-like dramaturgy of musical political economies. Matters at hand include civic responsibility, deception, education, fatalism, and the recent factions within consumer-level breakthroughs in AI technology as a tool in Gepetto's impoverished workshop, or, as a set of masks in the commedia dell'arte of digital production. In the end, the duo prescribe the entirety of musical commodification as a Pinocchio Story that proclaims "how funny I was when I was a puppet! And how happy I am now to have become a nice-a boy!"