Post-Pandemic Music Ecosystems: How They Could Be Better in 2021: Part 2

This is part 2 of a series of articles about the future of music ecosystems in a post-pandemic world. The objective is to demonstrate that no matter where you live, 2021 can be a great year. Here’s Part 1, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Civic regulation — policies that govern the built environment — impact all of us despite few showing any interest in it. Music ecosystems present a unique case in civic regulation. Most rules that govern music in cities and places have little to do with music. At the same time, specific rules that could be in place to better support music are often absent. One may need a dozen permits to stage live music in a city that has no formal music education policy. This is because music is impacted by, and impacts most built environment policy areas. Housing, regeneration, health and safety, equity, education, licensing, tourism, permitting all have a relationship with music. But few cities have music or cultural planners in their office of planning, or an artist-in-residence on the licensing committee, or a sound designer on their regeneration team. All are worth doing, by the way.

Because of this, there’s a lack of understanding that thriving music ecosystems are best when their component parts are arranged together. When it comes to music in this context, we give from one hand and take from the other. For example, the Michigan State Teachers Pension Fund is an investor in Concord, an independent label and publisher. Yet, music education in Michigan is facing severe budget cuts. It’s like investing in a bottled water company and claiming that ‘pond over there’ is fine in terms of getting all the water it needs. Once again, we disassociate the creator (the songwriter) from the created (the song) in how we manage music ecosystems in the built environment.

taken from https://www.borgenmagazine.com/music-education-fight-poverty/

We all use mobile phones, but few of us understand how they are built. There are over 300 parts to a phone, but all that matters is that it works. If the Michigan state teacher’s pension fund is returning a consistent yield, no problem then. It doesn’t matter that music lacks structural, on-the-ground investment in Michigan. That’s tomorrow’s problem.

If we think about regulation differently — how we incorporate music into civic life — I feel we can create far better music ecosystems in 2021 as we recover from the pandemic. Here are a few ideas and examples to demonstrate that this is worth pursuing.

1. Include the word ‘music’ in someone’s title. Make someone responsible: If something is not mentioned in policy or titles, it doesn’t exist. Signposting is important. No mention of music in strategic plans means no music policies. This results in music clashing with the policy frameworks mentioned earlier, which ends up in decisions being taken that impact music without those involved advocating for music ecosystems. This leads to likening the cultural night-time economy solely to nuisance and ignoring its employment capabilities or taking an ephemeral approach to supporting music by blowing a budget on a festival when low-income kids lack music education and publicly funded care homes can’t afford to hire musicians to entertain residents. If a city lacks a music strategy, it engages with music less strategically. Using the word in policy creates legitimacy. It means it exists. No matter the size of the place, music is active in your community. So should the word in its civic policy language.
2. State Your Community is Music Friendly: I am a fan of Texas’ Music Friendly Communities Program. It galvanises people — in government or not— to recognise the value of music by providing a framework to demonstrate it in local policy. It requires a community that wishes to be music friendly to have a ‘Music Liaison’ (yes, #1) and goes from there. A cursory google today showed that Denison, TX had just completed its certification and Dripping Springs, TX is ‘seeking its certification’. Dripping Springs is a town of 5,000 people. This model works if cities, towns and places ask to be music-friendly. This is a model that can be replicated. I’ll make sure of it in 2021.
3. Do What New South Wales in Australia Did: I wrote about this for Forbes and will continue to sing its praises because this is a replicable model for 2021. 63 regulations were reformed at once in New South Wales, many of them antiquated ordinances on the books since prohibition to better support live music. The impact is tremendous. Live music and the associated night-time economy are now seen as economic and cultural drivers. Sound is a management issue in law, not a nuisance issue. We are working on a similar process in one of our cities in the United States, where we are rewriting regulations related to zoning, parking, noise, loading zones, street performance and anti-racism and presenting them to the city council once, for one vote. Train hard, fight easy is the model. And ask once.
4. 2021 Can Usher In Cities Developing Soundscapes To Mirror Landscapes: We wrote a response to the proposed planning reforms in England in October, called Planning for the Future. We argued the proposed reforms did not recognise the role of culture, music and the night-time economy, with the lack of cohesion between planning and licensing being the main culprit. I’ve written about this a lot. While preparing our submission, the planning lawyer supporting the paper proposed an idea that cities should map their soundscapes and overlay them onto landscapes, to better understand how to incorporate music and night-time economy with housing and retail. Imagine if all developers had maps identifying sound usage with land usage. It would remove any excuse to build new flats without soundproofing next to existing music venues, for example. If we rethink how we plan our cities, sound planning (yes, pun intended) must be more prominent in recovery.

taken from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-we-can-support-worlds-rich-musical-diversity-180964724/

We can change rules because we are the ones that make them. We can incorporate music more intentionally into built environment policy in 2021.

Thanks for reading. In Part 3, I’ll explore how to better align civic and city priorities with music industry priorities and how together, we can all win.

Email me here or comment below. And I want to thank Sarah Clover QC for the soundscape idea.