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How All Musicians and the Communities They Live In Can Earn More From Music
Music Cities Resilience Handbook Series: Article 2.
Over the next months, I am going to explore different initiatives, lessons and best practices that have emerged since we published our Music Cities Resilience Handbook in June 2020. The first recommendation in the Music Cities Resilience Handbook is to put artists to work. Here are some thoughts on how this has evolved since 2020.
Most public and philanthropic funds distributed to support artists of all disciplines are through granting. This has, in some ways, accelerated over the last two years. Communities all over the world, large and small, created programs to support artists impacted by the pandemic. There was, and still is in many places, an urgency to get money out the door quickly. And with it, measurement of the impact of the support was not as integral to ensuring the money reached recipients speedily. This was not money to put artists to work. It was more to keep artists in work, in homes, and with food on the table.
What was missing, and we should now look deeper into, is how we fund or invest in the arts in general and how the money being spent can work harder. We can invest in content and communities at the same time, and with it provide more agency for artists and, importantly, more revenue opportunities if we explore this more as a circular economy.
First, we should understand how we invest in music and the arts and how it is different from how we invest in most everything else. And this difference need not exist. As I have written in the past, the manner in which both the public and private sectors invest in infrastructure — frameworks we all need to survive — is often based on estimating the future value of the asset and then funding it based on this anticipated future return. This works well for the things we all agree we need — roads, schools and hospitals, and the like. This predictive modelling also influences how bonds are rated, to measure the risk of communities being able to pay the bond back. With music and the arts, at a community level, we employ a different model. We provide single grants with little understanding of their prospective value for the future and often do this through the lens of…
