One of the key things I took away from being a part of the Music Business Day at the University of Utrecht last weekend is that there’s ways to balance the weaknesses and opportunities that the pandemic has respectively exposed and opened up. I’ll look into this by focusing on four things to consider that Catherine Moore highlighted in our panel on ‘music futures, near and far’:
- People
- How to measure the market?
- Place
- How does music enrich the environment in which we live?
- Public health
- What is the role of music & musicians to support mental health?
- Communication
- Change the vocabulary around how music works within, e.g., a city: music venue is a sound manager not a noise maker. How do we communicate across disciplines?
Do you really want to be a musician?
When Jonathan Irons mentioned that only 1% of a musicians’ life takes place on stage, it presented a hook that allowed everyone else on this day of music business to contextualize. So much of what we feel is ‘the music industry’ focuses on the live experience. Fans mythologize live events and artists need to perform at 100% night after night on stage. Yet, there’s so much happening around those brief moments that musicians experience on stage. It’s there that musicians, or agencies, or labels, etc. can build a brand and a franchise out of the music.
That’s one thing that became clear: musicians need to treat their music as a business. And the second thing is that if the artist cannot do it, there’s an opportunity for another business to step in and help the artist sell their music. Most musicians grapple with all the many things that are expected from them: keep track of your social media, practice, do community management, write new music, practice more, and so on. Being able to do that requires time and money. As Sarah Osborn, of UK-based Incorporated Society of Musicians, mentioned, employment is one of the weaknesses that the pandemic has exposed within the music industry. So much in the business relies on freelancers and the question was raised whether the music industry will go the way of the acting profession. Will it become normal for a professional musician to have another job and just music doesn’t provide a sustainable life in and of itself?
We discussed this part of the music industry with the students to help them step into it with their eyes wide open and that it’s necessary to approach the portfolio career. Professor Emile Wennekes pushed everyone to put their names out there, either by publishing your music, writing about music, or even engaging in policy. Having set this stage, the day took a turn around Anthony Gritten‘s notion that we should look at career as a verb.
Careering through the music industry
People
When we start to think about the music business as a network that involves a lot of performativity this allows us to reshape our roles within it. Moreover, it takes those brief moments of live interaction between musicians and fans and networks them into more stages of reciprocity. When starting any venture, it’s important to know your market, to analyse your potential audience and find out where they are. If you make music, for example, you can use Spotify for Artists, Chartmetric, etc. to understand where your music is popular. A next step is to create something that brings benefits to both you and the fan. This is the staple of the creator economy, something that underlines the 1000-fan and 100-fan theories. There’s plenty to argue against this theory, but the essence sits behind every creator with a Patreon, every newsletter author who monetizes through Substack, and every band with a Shopify website.
Place
Music has the ability to enrich the environment in which we live and move. Starting with R. Murray Schafer (check out the World Soundscape Project), there’s a whole scholarship on ‘the soundscape’ and its role in determining how people relate to their surroundings. With Barry Truax this notion developed into something more attuned to design, something to influence. What our discussions during the Music Business Day added to this is that we need to embrace more the idea of music as a utility. Creating music for and bringing music into places to help improve experiences, interactions, and even personal psychology is not ‘selling out’ but a valid way to create and add value.
Public health
On the one hand this topic segues nicely from the previous argument around ‘place’. Creating music, making playlists, performing wellbeing are all great ways to help situate music in the cross-section of adding value for the musician and a fan (or not even necessarily a fan in this case). Moreover, there’s plenty of research to support that music has a positive effect both on health care and its associated costs. On the other hand, there’s the mental health risks for musicians, exacerbated by the current pandemic. With many musicians already having trouble securing a modal income through their music, taking out income related to session work and live performance made that even harder.
Communication
Terminology matters. It matters how we communicate and which vocabulary we use. Just think of how different it is to consider a music venue in a city a sound manager instead of noise maker. One key group working hard to change our vocabulary when it comes to music is Sound Diplomacy. Their objective is to show how music, and culture in general, bring economic, social and cultural growth to cities. One thing the pandemic has done is to shine a light on what music and culture bring to the table and how those industries could even help to kickstart the economy post-pandemic. Rebuilding Europe, research conducted by EY for GESAC, the European collective societies, shows that before Covid-19 hit the music industry grew 4% year-over-year, then, in 2020, it shrunk by 76%. And yet, because of the social cohesion attached to music and the power of communication connected to music it has strong potential to help bring about both a social and economic upturn as and when we start to move through the final stages of the pandemic. To help facilitate that, we’ll need to choose our words carefully.
Overall a day of music business left me with a firm notion that there’s only music industries instead of a singular music industry. At the end of the day, we were all quietly optimistic about the future with exciting changes happening right now to how music is created, performed, and consumed. And yet, there was also a strong sense that music needs to increase social capital and that a political voice is necessary to navigate what will be a rocky recovery from the impact of the pandemic.