Matt Brennan 1
IASPM UK-I Cork conference
12 September 2014
The Cultural Value of Live Music
Today I want to talk about the cultural value of live music. In the past year I’ve worked on two small projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and before I go any further I should say that these were collaborative efforts with Adam Behr and Martin Cloonan, and everything that follows should be credited to them too. Martin is already presenting another paper at this conference, and Adam is presenting two papers, so I’m on my own up here, but I’m part of a team working on this.
Background – Live Music Project
A bit of background first. I’m part of a group of live music researchers which includes Adam, Martin, Simon Frith and Emma Webster.One of our projects is a three-volume history of live music in Britain from 1950 to the present, the first volume of which was published by Ashgate in 2013, and the second volume of which will hopefully be out by the end of next year.
That team also co-founded the Live Music Exchange, which is a website (livemusicexchange.org) and research hub that curates a database, workshops, and mediation services for various stakeholders in the live music sector. We also have social media presence on twitter and facebook if anyone is interested.
As many of you know, under austerity policies in the UK government in recent years, arts organizations, many of which promote and develop live music, have come under increasing pressure to justify their value or face having their funding cut. In 2014, the live music sector in the UK is not booming like it was in the mid-2000s, and there’s a concernthe majority of the sector’s economic value is derived from the bigstadium events and mega-festivals, while smaller live music operators are struggling.
So the cultural sector in the UK has faced pressure in recent years to reduce its value to its economic impact, and that’s resulted in a problem. John Holden from the think tank DEMOS once described it as the problem of arts organizations’ “energies [being] directed into chasing funding and collecting evidence rather than achieving cultural purposes. In the search for outcomes and ancillary benefits, the essence of culture has been lost” (Holden 2004: 20).[1]
Arts companies have produced studies attempting to demonstrate their economic impact ‘in terms of jobs created and value added’, but have been less successful at measuring what Hasan Bakhshi of NESTA calls the “intrinsic value created as part of their core missions” (Bakhshi 2012: 2).[2]Both Holden and Bakhshi advocate therefore, a move towards making sense of cultural value of the arts rather than just economic value.
So in 2013 a call came out from the AHRC for projects focusing on Cultural Value. The AHRC wanted to accomplish 3 things:
1) establish a framework that will advance the way in which we talk about the value of cultural engagement and the methods by which we evaluate that value.
2) broaden our focus beyond publicly-funded arts and culture, to embrace all activities including those in the third and commercial sectors.
3) begin by looking at the actual experience of culture and the arts rather than the ancillary effects of this experience. (AHRC 2013)
So Adam, Martin, and myself decided to do a project asking the following questions:
What is meant by ‘cultural value’ in the context of live music?
What kind of value do promoters, performers and audiences derive from participating in live music?
How can qualitative research into the cultural experience of live music be used to complement existing research?
How might research into the non-economic value of live music be used by policymakers and other stakeholders?
The Queen’s Hall – outside, its relation to Edinburgh
And we proposed exploring these questions by looking at a particular venue in Scotland, the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh.It was originally a church built in 1823, and then converted into a music venue in 1979.
The Queen’s Hall is a 900-capacity venue which hosts approximately 200 performances of live music a year across all genres. You can see the seating plan here. It’s a flexible venue in some respects, but as a former church, it’s not so flexible in other ways. The pillars and pews, for instance, add character to the hall, but the pillars can obstruct sightlines to the performance onstage, and the pews are not super comfortable.
The Hall receives some subsidy from Edinburgh City Council and is the home of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which is directly funded by the Scottish Government. But it also relies on commercial income from venue hire by amateur and semi-professional artists, the Edinburgh International Festival, as well as Scotland’s biggest commercial promoters like DF Concerts, Regular Music. So that’s the same hall in both photos, but not the same concert, although if all classical music shows had wicked spotlights and lasers, I might go to them more often.
The Queen’s Hall is a good case study to consider how cultural value is generated across the spheres of amateur/enthusiast, state subsidised, and commercial models of concert promotion.For this particular project, we wanted to investigate how cultural value is articulated in different types of live music event. We also wanted to look at a range of genres, picking case studies from jazz, folk, classical, and pop music. So we picked six concerts to study between September and December 2013.
Our case studies – Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham pilot (Sept 28)
The first was Scottish traditional duo Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham, pictured here.
We used several methods to capture how performers and audiences at live music events experience the event, and how these can be developed into a larger narrative about the cultural value of live music. These included: 1) Literature review; 2) in-venue surveys (on the evening of each case study concert) and online surveys. ; 3) Reflective diaries from audience members before and after concerts; 4) interviews with audience members, performers, promoters and venue staff; 5) Social media and press analysis; and 6) a focus group involving audience members from each of the six case study concerts in the same room together.
Essentially we wanted to figure out who is drawn into the orbit of a live music event, who ends up in the building in each case study, and why they were there.
Our case studies – Branford Marsalis and SNJO (sept 29)
This photo is from our second case study, Branford Marsalis and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra.
We asked audience members in questionnaires, reflective diaries, and focus groups about what they valued about live music, and one of the first findings is that unsurprisingly there are different, sometimes contradictory values that audience derive.
Surprise/unexpected (discovering and feeling something new in music) vs. confirmation of already held tastes (some people don’t like to veer into the unfamiliar)
The QH gets praised again and again for being able to provide an intimate experience with the artist, a feeling of closeness – people want to be in the presence of a favourite performer, but they also want to be able to see music being made, sometimes in a very technical way). Other people want the opposite, they want spectacle (people want a show, they want sound and lights and a almost theatrical performance from the artist to augment the music that they can’t get in their own home).
Unique atmosphere/character (the idiosyncrasies of a gig and its venue are sometimes valued) vs. predictable smooth logistics (not having to wait in huge queues, the guarantee of a good seat, etc.)
Our case studies – Scottish Chamber Orchestra (oct 24, nov13)
That’s the Scottish Chamber Orchestra again, another one of our case studies.
Audiences mentioned the value of having a Communal experience, while others referenced something that you might call ‘inward participation’ (going to an individual, transcendent place). Another contrast was the idea of rapt attention (motionless, hearing a pin drop) vs. outward physical participation (movement, dance, crowd participation seen as enhancing the experience) – not just a classical vs. pop distinction (TMBG example).
Our case studies – They Might Be Giants (nov 14)
Whether it be losing oneself in a crowd, reinforcing bonds with people one is at the concert with, or immersion in the musical aesthetic, another point that’s apparent across interviews and surveys we did is that they all reference back to an experience that, at its apex, is in some way transcendent.The concert/gig doesn’t need to attain this ‘transcendence’ to have value – but it’s the potential for that which keeps people going back – whether live music attendance is part of the fabric of their regular activities (as for an SCO subscription holder) or a special occasion (the TMBG gig goer who has travelled up from Bristol to see their show at QH, and our 5th case study)
Our case studies – Heidi Talbot (dec 5)
There is also a way in which all this talk of cultural value implicitly assumes that there is always going to be value to find. There is the problem of lack of value – the only way this showed up in our research was people recounting bad gigs they had been to or what diminished the value of gig. We talked to people who went to see singer-songwriter Heidi Talbot, our 6th case study, but there is also the issue of not everyone who didn’t go to these concerts at all; it’s not just a problem of hearing from people who didn’t volunteeer to fill in surveys or do interviews that are a problem here but non-participants, those who don’t show up in the data because they weren’t in the building in the first place.
Finally, there’s a tension between instrinsic versus instrumental value when talking about culture. People’s first port of call when asked about the ‘intrinsic’ value of live music was to rather ephemeral terms – energy, life affirming, etc. When pressed, they often collapse back into instrumental values (mental health benefits, mood enhancing). These benefits are perhaps easier to measure but still derive from the intrinsic CV, and are not a measure of it.
the ecology of live music
While our Queen’s Hall project was running, the AHRC then announced a call in late 2013 for proposals which explored the ‘ECOLOGY OF PUBLICLY-FUNDED AND COMMERCIAL ARTS AND CULTURAL PROVISION’. In particular the AHRC was interested in ‘mapping the ecology of the subsidised and the commercial sectors, thinking about the relationships between small arts organisations and the big players, as well perhaps as the place of the amateur and voluntary arts in this overall ecology’ (AHRC 2013).
From pub to stadium
Once again, we thought we could explore this idea using the case of live music, and thinking about how venues of different sizes in a particular locality relate to one another – we called the project“from pub to stadium”. The questions we wanted to ask in the second project were:
What are the relationships between private and public investment at different levels in the ecology of live music venues in the UK?
What constitutes ‘investment’ in the live music ecology? How are activities and inputs from various stakeholders (e.g. direct financial contributions, ‘in kind’ contributions, indirect actions such as regulation and deregulation) counted?
How do public sector and commercial investors conceptualise the values accrued from the activities taking place in live music venues, and prioritise them in their short, medium and long term strategies?
What light can qualitative research shine on the health of the live music ecology and on productive ways forward for its development?
How might policy makers usefully respond to the findings to support the weaker parts of the ecology?
From pub to stadium – three partners
We partnered with three organisations on the project. We consulted UK Music, who helped connect us to a network of useful contacts for interviews.We interviewed representatives from the Musicians’ Union, and they helped disseminate the report online and through a launch at their offices in London.Finally, the Performing Right Society (PRS) gave us anonymised data on the number of PRS-licensed live events in a given year for ourthree case study localities - Camden, Leeds, and Glasgow.
From pub to stadium report launch
In this project the primary focus of the study was to provide a qualitative account of venue operators in the UK. The main method was therefore semi-structured interviews, whose aim was to provide equal space for stakeholders from across the live music ecology – nationally and locally.We published the report you see here in July, and I have some hard copies with me here for anyone who wants to take one home. I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail, but our key findings in the report were that:
1) The weakest point of the live music ecology at present is small to medium independent venues.
2) Policymakers need to pay more heed to the economic and cultural contribution of smaller venues. Local regimes often focus their attention on major developments whose key beneficiaries are larger businesses.
3) Greater harmonisation of regulatory regimes and their implementation across the UK will benefit independent and major operators alike. Here I’m talking about different departments in local city councils that affect live music such as planning, health and safety, resident complaints, and licensing.
4) The need for a more ‘joined up’ approach across council services is widely acknowledged but not always fully implemented.
5) Competition between cities drives investment in infrastructural projects, like the recent building of entertainment arenas in Leeds and Glasgow, but one of the side effects of such regeneration can be a more difficult environment for venues without the commercial or political wherewithal to adapt quickly to ‘gentrification’.
6) It is these smaller spaces that provide both performance and social spaces for rising acts. They feed into an area’s ‘local character’ – its musical history – in a way that makes them difficult to replace. This social aspect of independent venues, along with the relationships that derive from it, is the seed-bed from which a town or city’s musical reputation grows.
As I say, there’s plenty more in the report, but you can take a copy with you or download it from our website, I’ll put the link up in just a moment.
Conclusion
I wanted to conclude by reflecting on the role of popular music academics. There is no question that the AHRC’s Cultural Value project is linked to a political agenda. Academics are increasingly expected to justify the value of the arts and humanities in a period of austerity policies. They’re also expected to work with non-academic partners and maximize “impact”, to use the research council’s jargon. All of this feels a long way from my naïve assumptions about what being a pop music academic was going to be like in my days as a postgrad. And I’m skeptical of rubbing shoulders too closely with industry bodies, but our responsibility as academics has to be to think critically about culture in the interests of citizens, and to have the space to do that. On the other hand, after holding several workshops on live music in Edinburgh in 2013 and 2014, and trying to involve various stakeholders (another research council term) including city council to discuss the shortage of small to medium sized venues in the city outside of festival season, we saw the following newspaper article appear in late June this summer:
Edinburgh Evening News:
EMPTY council buildings could be rented out as music venues and rehearsal spaces under ambitious plans to revamp live music in the city. Changes to licensing laws which would make it easier to lay on gigs and loans to support noise reduction are also to be looked at. The new strategy will see a live music taskforce formed by city councillors featuring experts, bands, promoters and venue owners – all tasked with agreeing a single five-year vision for the city’s music scene.
So although it’s felt at times like we’ve had to make compromises in terms of how openly critical we can be of the groups that we have to partner with, on the other hand sometimes it produces results that our usual research outputs don’t.
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[1]Demos is Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank. We have spent 20 years at the centre of the policy debate, with an overarching mission to bring politics closer to people.
[2]National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.