From pub to stadium: The ecology of public and commercial investment in British live music venues
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Edinburgh College of Art
Abstract
Live music is a prime illustration of wider issues in the UK's cultural sector. Pressure on the public purse, nationally and locally, is felt from larger institutions - orchestras, opera companies, etc.- to the grassroots as direct funding dries up due to cuts. Meanwhile, live music has overtaken recorded sector revenues since 2008. Major events sell-out in hours and, as lobbying group UK Music's recent report on music tourism shows, the live sector is a significant source of income for the nation.
Yet the benefits are felt unevenly, and not simply as a matter of suffering state subsidised arts and a healthy commercial sector. Growing concern for the fate of venues at the lower level of the economic activity is reflected in media and industry reports of struggles and closure. Neither is this just recession based. The key piece of music related legislation in recent times - the Live Music Act 2012 - deregulated the provision of live music of all kinds in licensed premises. But it was the result of a long campaign by industry, grassroots and legislators that arose from the negative impact of earlier licensing legislation in 2003 on venues and practitioners. Calls for more deregulation also involve both industry (UK Music) and musicians' (the Musicians' Union) representatives.
Neither are music venues alone in their predicament. Questions of how to support culture hinge on assessments of how to value it - for economic benefit or innate social worth - and intersect with those about the role of the state and private vs public investment. Opposing speeches by UK Culture Secretary Maria Miller and Scottish Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop have starkly illustrated the lines between economic and intrinsic values as cases for investment.
Implicit in wider debates and those around live music is a sense that different points on the scale of activity are interdependent. Today's stadium acts started in the pubs and local hotspots that are now struggling - in other words, an ecological model. Again, private and public sector inputs are not discrete but interdependent. Transport infrastructure, sensitive or draconian local licensing regimes, zoning and health and safety policies all affect local live music ecologies just as do direct investment from state, municipality or commerce.
We will shed light on such interactions - the funding ecology - by examining them in context and practice in three case-study localities across the UK - the London Borough of Camden, Leeds and Glasgow. We will work with three key sector groups: PRS for Music, who license venues' use of copyright compositions, will provide data allowing us to map the size and types of venue in each area. With UK Music and the Musicians' Union (MU), we will then select case studies of venue capacities in six categories: Small (Under 200 capacity); Small-Medium (200-500); Medium (500-2,000); Medium-Large (2,000-5,000); Large (5,000-20,000); Very Large (20,000+).
Interviews with local and national policy makers, council officers, regional MU representatives, and venue operators will, along with the mapping exercise, show how the interplay of regulation, finance, ownership and management structures produce and reflect conceptions of cultural value in theory and in practice across the live music venue ecology.
The ecological model of music venues in the context of investment and stakeholder activity will both broaden and sharpen our understanding of the sector. It will account for the narratives of public and private actors in shaping the environment in which musical careers proceed as an interdependent system of different levels of economic activity. The effects of local and national regulation, alongside various forms of direct subsidy and indirect support (or hindrance), are felt in ways both obvious and hidden. We will illuminate this system to provide insights into live music, and cultural activity at large, for policy makers, industry and practitioners alike.
Yet the benefits are felt unevenly, and not simply as a matter of suffering state subsidised arts and a healthy commercial sector. Growing concern for the fate of venues at the lower level of the economic activity is reflected in media and industry reports of struggles and closure. Neither is this just recession based. The key piece of music related legislation in recent times - the Live Music Act 2012 - deregulated the provision of live music of all kinds in licensed premises. But it was the result of a long campaign by industry, grassroots and legislators that arose from the negative impact of earlier licensing legislation in 2003 on venues and practitioners. Calls for more deregulation also involve both industry (UK Music) and musicians' (the Musicians' Union) representatives.
Neither are music venues alone in their predicament. Questions of how to support culture hinge on assessments of how to value it - for economic benefit or innate social worth - and intersect with those about the role of the state and private vs public investment. Opposing speeches by UK Culture Secretary Maria Miller and Scottish Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop have starkly illustrated the lines between economic and intrinsic values as cases for investment.
Implicit in wider debates and those around live music is a sense that different points on the scale of activity are interdependent. Today's stadium acts started in the pubs and local hotspots that are now struggling - in other words, an ecological model. Again, private and public sector inputs are not discrete but interdependent. Transport infrastructure, sensitive or draconian local licensing regimes, zoning and health and safety policies all affect local live music ecologies just as do direct investment from state, municipality or commerce.
We will shed light on such interactions - the funding ecology - by examining them in context and practice in three case-study localities across the UK - the London Borough of Camden, Leeds and Glasgow. We will work with three key sector groups: PRS for Music, who license venues' use of copyright compositions, will provide data allowing us to map the size and types of venue in each area. With UK Music and the Musicians' Union (MU), we will then select case studies of venue capacities in six categories: Small (Under 200 capacity); Small-Medium (200-500); Medium (500-2,000); Medium-Large (2,000-5,000); Large (5,000-20,000); Very Large (20,000+).
Interviews with local and national policy makers, council officers, regional MU representatives, and venue operators will, along with the mapping exercise, show how the interplay of regulation, finance, ownership and management structures produce and reflect conceptions of cultural value in theory and in practice across the live music venue ecology.
The ecological model of music venues in the context of investment and stakeholder activity will both broaden and sharpen our understanding of the sector. It will account for the narratives of public and private actors in shaping the environment in which musical careers proceed as an interdependent system of different levels of economic activity. The effects of local and national regulation, alongside various forms of direct subsidy and indirect support (or hindrance), are felt in ways both obvious and hidden. We will illuminate this system to provide insights into live music, and cultural activity at large, for policy makers, industry and practitioners alike.
Planned Impact
The project has been specifically designed to facilitate knowledge exchange to the music industries and build upon the unique connections that the research team has established with them. The main targets for impact are listed in all caps:
CONCERT PROMOTERS are key cultural actors whose actions construct and mediate cultural value within the live music industry. Their actions have perhaps the most profound impact upon the live music ecology. The most successful promoters are those who best manage to negotiate the complex milieu of the private and public funding opportunities available while at the same time remaining acutely conscious of the prevailing regulatory and wider governance framework within which they are operating. This project offers the potential for promoters to become more reflexive and to adjust their promotional practice in the light of our findings. The presence of UK Music as a project partner offers a significant opportunity for the research to permeate the promotional world.
MUSICIANS will benefit from increased knowledge of the ways in which musical events are organised around a mixture of public and private funding which again includes the regulatory and broader governance infrastructure within which these events take place. The project offers the potential to illuminate the characteristics which promoters are looking for in artists at various levels of the live music industry, and also to empower musicians in their own business practices and assist them in promoting their own events, something the supporters of this bid are keen to encourage. This is an area in which our team members have previously collaborated with the Musicians' Union (MU) in raising awareness and training. Likewise, disseminating our findings via the MU enhances the likelihood of impact upon musicians.
In addition to dissemination via the MU the research will be disseminated via UK Music, the key MUSIC INDUSTRIES lobbying group for the UK, and PRS For Music, the songwriters' collecting agency, both of which will be represented on the advisory group. We plan to disseminate the research to other key bodies such as the DCMS, Scottish Music Industry Association, Arts Council of England, the Confederation of Scottish Local Authorities and the Local Government Association. In seeking to show how live music events emerge from a complex interaction of public and private investments we aim to help such agencies develop better policies to enhance the live music ecology. We are optimistic about the possibility of presenting findings to national POLICY MAKERS in the form of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Music, also represented on the advisory board. We also aim to help policy makers to make assessments of the implications for their own practice.
CONCERT VENUES are an essential part of the live music ecology. They vary widely in size, location, genre-base, provision etc. and the research has been designed to account for this. Venues are key sites for the articulation of cultural value, yet few have the time to analyse how this emerges and what the implications of this are. The research will offer insight into what the interaction of public and private investment is at various levels of the live music industry, and the greater understanding of the live music ecology has obvious implications for those venues who wish to develop new activities, expand or simply survive in the current economic climate. The PRS has extensive connections to UK venues, and we will also use the Live Music Exchange to ensure that the report reaches relevant networks, eg: the National Arenas Association, the Association of Independent Festivals.
We intend to engage these groups in three ways: 1) our advisory board (which includes members from the above groups); 2) inviting key representatives from the groups above to our concluding seminar at the MU office; 3) disseminating the final report to the representative bodies outlined above.
CONCERT PROMOTERS are key cultural actors whose actions construct and mediate cultural value within the live music industry. Their actions have perhaps the most profound impact upon the live music ecology. The most successful promoters are those who best manage to negotiate the complex milieu of the private and public funding opportunities available while at the same time remaining acutely conscious of the prevailing regulatory and wider governance framework within which they are operating. This project offers the potential for promoters to become more reflexive and to adjust their promotional practice in the light of our findings. The presence of UK Music as a project partner offers a significant opportunity for the research to permeate the promotional world.
MUSICIANS will benefit from increased knowledge of the ways in which musical events are organised around a mixture of public and private funding which again includes the regulatory and broader governance infrastructure within which these events take place. The project offers the potential to illuminate the characteristics which promoters are looking for in artists at various levels of the live music industry, and also to empower musicians in their own business practices and assist them in promoting their own events, something the supporters of this bid are keen to encourage. This is an area in which our team members have previously collaborated with the Musicians' Union (MU) in raising awareness and training. Likewise, disseminating our findings via the MU enhances the likelihood of impact upon musicians.
In addition to dissemination via the MU the research will be disseminated via UK Music, the key MUSIC INDUSTRIES lobbying group for the UK, and PRS For Music, the songwriters' collecting agency, both of which will be represented on the advisory group. We plan to disseminate the research to other key bodies such as the DCMS, Scottish Music Industry Association, Arts Council of England, the Confederation of Scottish Local Authorities and the Local Government Association. In seeking to show how live music events emerge from a complex interaction of public and private investments we aim to help such agencies develop better policies to enhance the live music ecology. We are optimistic about the possibility of presenting findings to national POLICY MAKERS in the form of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Music, also represented on the advisory board. We also aim to help policy makers to make assessments of the implications for their own practice.
CONCERT VENUES are an essential part of the live music ecology. They vary widely in size, location, genre-base, provision etc. and the research has been designed to account for this. Venues are key sites for the articulation of cultural value, yet few have the time to analyse how this emerges and what the implications of this are. The research will offer insight into what the interaction of public and private investment is at various levels of the live music industry, and the greater understanding of the live music ecology has obvious implications for those venues who wish to develop new activities, expand or simply survive in the current economic climate. The PRS has extensive connections to UK venues, and we will also use the Live Music Exchange to ensure that the report reaches relevant networks, eg: the National Arenas Association, the Association of Independent Festivals.
We intend to engage these groups in three ways: 1) our advisory board (which includes members from the above groups); 2) inviting key representatives from the groups above to our concluding seminar at the MU office; 3) disseminating the final report to the representative bodies outlined above.
| Description | Our research findings, which are described in full in our report (URL provided below), can be summarized as follows: 1) The weakest point of the live music ecology at present is the 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. 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, yet 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. Our peer-reviewed article "Live Concert Performance: An Ecological Approach" outlined the following additional findings: We began to use the term "ecology" in our research into the business of live music in response to a couple of observations and a repeated theme emerging from interviews with promoters and venue owners. The observations would be familiar to anyone who has hung around a venue before a show starts, or sat and watched a sound check in a stadium: first, there seemed to be a surprising number of people walking back and forth apparently doing nothing; second, everyone seemed focused not on the music as such but on the material conditions of music-making, on technology (all those cables, boxes, soundboards, lights, computers, etc. to be heaved and positioned and secured) and on bricks and mortar, on the effects of the shape of the building on entry and exit, stage arrangements, acoustics, security and musicians and audience movement. What quickly emerged from our interviews, meanwhile, was that promoters and, in particular, venue owners, were as much if not more concerned with their relationship with regulations and regulators-in terms of licensing laws, noise, health and safety and so forth- as they were with their dealings with agents, managers and musicians. To put this another way, it became clear to us that people who weren't members of a music world or scene (as those terms are usually used) were just as significant for the way rock gigs are constructed. Putting these observational and interview findings together, we had to rethink what we meant by the live music environment. Hence our use of the term ecology. In this paper we have illustrated our approach with three case studies, but the underlying question remains to be answered: is "ecology" a helpful term in the analysis of live rock music? The answer seems to be no and yes! No, in that part of what our work suggests is simply that we need make more complex existing socio-economic accounts of the construction of live music events, to ensure that people and activities carefully kept backstage to ensure that the performances themselves seem magical are brought into the glare of the academic spotlight. We need to understand what those people apparently wandering aimlessly or marching purposefully about as a gig is put together are actually doing (this was an important aspect of our Queen's Hall research). But, that said, there is more to this than a richer understanding of social networks. An ecological approach draws attention to three other points. First, it draws attention, as all our case studies illustrate, to the materiality of the buildings in which live music happens. Such buildings may or may not have been constructed as musical sites; even when they were, the musical ideology inscribed in their physical and acoustic design may or may not be compatible with the physical symbolization of contemporary musical communities. Either way buildings don't just exist in people's minds. The history of British rock, for example, cannot be properly understood without reference to the places available for performance and what they made possible and impossible (see Frith et al.). Live music is therefore best understood as a living cultural practice that is embedded in-and depends on-a surrounding material culture. Second, a musical event is not just cultural, the result of ideological agreement among actors who, in coming to such agreement, form a musical world. A live musical event also involves constant negotiation with people who are not part of a shared ideological construct. These relationships between two kinds of actors mean that live music is an interdependent musical world made from what might at first seem like unrelated spheres of work and types of worker. It is true that some of the people in the latter group (who we might in general call "regulators") may, simply because of their everyday engagement with venues or events, become default members of these musical worlds. We certainly found example of particular local authority licensing and noise abatement officers who could be described this way. But we also found many more examples of national and local authority officials making decisions without any reference to live music at all but which have profound consequences for what kind of music could be made where, in both positive and negative terms; encouraging some sorts of musical event (as at the Hydro), and preventing others (as when planning officers allow residential building near music clubs with devastating consequences for what sort of music those clubs can stage when). In other words, and more broadly, many of the most important policies for music in a locality are not specifically about music. (Frith, Cloonan and Williamson 83). Third, though, the value of the term ecology lies elsewhere, in drawing attention to issues of sustainability (see Keogh). This is particularly important for policy makers (and a reason for welcoming the term's routine appearance now in policy documents). When policy makers are considering how to sustain a local musical culture or bolster a national musical economy, it is important that they understand the relationship between all the factors we have discussed here. It is important that they realize that a decision about, say, the subsidy of public transport, has, among other things, significant consequences for who can get to a venue and when. Similarly, while the primary goal of commercial promoters is to pursue their own profits, they too need to be aware that a policy which, in competitive terms, makes it impossible for small promoters or venues to survive will, in the long term, have a decisive impact on their own sustainability too. Our historical research suggests that the recurring tendency towards oligopoly in live music never ends well! The bigger the company gets, the less its centralized components understand how new musical communities, new musical places, appear and develop. Interactions at ground level increasingly become the province of staff (at venues like King Tut's) whose immediate concerns are different from those of corporate strategists. An ecological approach helps to draw out the complexities of these highly variegated industrial and geographical relationships. It draws attention too to the complexities of relationships across time: while a gig is always necessarily taking place here and now, it is also bound into an ecological development of how gigs happened in the past and how they will happen in the future. These three points of focus-the materiality of venues, the interdependence of otherwise disparate actors, and the sustainability of the resulting live music culture-form the basis for future research into the ecology of live music. |
| Exploitation Route | Our findings may be put to good use by local authorities who wish to update or refresh their cultural policies to encourage live music to flourish in cities. |
| Sectors | Creative Economy,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://livemusicexchange.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Cultural-Value-of-Live-Music-Pub-to-Stadium-report.pdf |
| Description | Based on our findings, we successfully applied for a KE and Impact Award from the University of Edinburgh to conduct a census of live music in the city, the first of its kind in Europe. The quantitative census data combined with the qualitative AHRC project data allowed us to provide recommendations to Edinburgh City Council's Culture and Sport Committee. It also influenced the debate on live music in cities through press coverage of our activities in the Edinburgh Evening News, The Scotsman, STV, Evening Express, Metro, The National, and The Herald (all October 2015). Our research findings informed the Music is Audible campaign resulting in successful reform of Licensing Board policy of City of Edinburgh Council in September 2016. Our findings were also used by - and reinforced our credibility with - organizations representing the top levels of the UK music industries including UK Music, the Musicians' Union, PRS for Music, and Music Venue Trust. This resulted in project partnerships with the aforementioned organizations to conduct the world's first national live music census in 2017, and fed into campaign efforts to introduce the Agent of Change principle into the planning frameworks at UK and Scottish Government levels. |
| Sector | Creative Economy,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | CHSS KE and Impact Award |
| Amount | £2,900 (GBP) |
| Organisation | University of Edinburgh |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 06/2015 |
| End | 09/2015 |
| Description | Pub to Stadium project industry collaborations |
| Organisation | Musicians' Union |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | Our team conducted the research as outlined in our Je-S application (e.g. interviews, literature review, data analysis) that led to the following report: Behr, Adam, Matt Brennan and Martin Cloonan. 2014. The Cultural Value of Live Music from the Pub to the Stadium: Getting Beyond the Numbers. Edinburgh: Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with UK Music, Musicians' Union, Performing Right Society. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The project partners contributed the following: - Free provision of room for report launch and seminar - Staff time for advisory board, interviews, and case studies - Dissemination of report to members/industry stakeholders |
| Impact | Behr, Adam, Matt Brennan and Martin Cloonan. 2014. The Cultural Value of Live Music from the Pub to the Stadium: Getting Beyond the Numbers. Edinburgh: Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with UK Music, Musicians' Union, Performing Right Society. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Pub to Stadium project industry collaborations |
| Organisation | PRS for Music |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | Our team conducted the research as outlined in our Je-S application (e.g. interviews, literature review, data analysis) that led to the following report: Behr, Adam, Matt Brennan and Martin Cloonan. 2014. The Cultural Value of Live Music from the Pub to the Stadium: Getting Beyond the Numbers. Edinburgh: Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with UK Music, Musicians' Union, Performing Right Society. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The project partners contributed the following: - Free provision of room for report launch and seminar - Staff time for advisory board, interviews, and case studies - Dissemination of report to members/industry stakeholders |
| Impact | Behr, Adam, Matt Brennan and Martin Cloonan. 2014. The Cultural Value of Live Music from the Pub to the Stadium: Getting Beyond the Numbers. Edinburgh: Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with UK Music, Musicians' Union, Performing Right Society. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | Pub to Stadium project industry collaborations |
| Organisation | UK Music |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | Our team conducted the research as outlined in our Je-S application (e.g. interviews, literature review, data analysis) that led to the following report: Behr, Adam, Matt Brennan and Martin Cloonan. 2014. The Cultural Value of Live Music from the Pub to the Stadium: Getting Beyond the Numbers. Edinburgh: Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with UK Music, Musicians' Union, Performing Right Society. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The project partners contributed the following: - Free provision of room for report launch and seminar - Staff time for advisory board, interviews, and case studies - Dissemination of report to members/industry stakeholders |
| Impact | Behr, Adam, Matt Brennan and Martin Cloonan. 2014. The Cultural Value of Live Music from the Pub to the Stadium: Getting Beyond the Numbers. Edinburgh: Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with UK Music, Musicians' Union, Performing Right Society. |
| Start Year | 2014 |
| Description | From Pub to Stadium report launch at Musicians' Union |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | We launched our report, "The Cultural Value of Live Music from the Pub to the Stadium," at the Musicians' Union headquarters in London on 25 July 2014, which included a presentation of findings, discussion, and networking. The launch was well attended and included representatives from the music industries and policymakers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |