Fit for purpose? : Funding the creative economy beyond venues and stars
Funding for the arts will never be at the forefront of electoral politics, however recent Federal budgets seem to have created even further distance between arts practice and government funding. The Victorian Government is currently consulting with the community on the next iteration of its Arts funding policy – Creative Victoria. We believe that our last piece of research highlights new ways to think about funding for performing musicians.
As noted in the conversation, Arts commentators roundly dismissed the 2016 budget saying it “fails to deliver any major new policy initiatives or programs” for the industry. More importantly,current election debates about arts funding, fail to grasp the heart of the creative industry, its network economy. We examined a small instance of this network economy a few years ago.
Over the month of November 2015 Adam Simmons gathered 100 musicians together to perform duetswith him over 25 nights (called 100:25:1). What tied them all together was that every one of them had previously played with multi-instrumentalist Adam Simmons. This event seriesshowcased the talents of this group of 100 of Melbourne’s most talented jazz, classical, experimental, world, and mainstream rock musicians. Another reason we were interested, (Adam and myself) was that when we collected data from them about who they played with, - who they networked with – we saw a unique picture of the music industry few have observed in Australia: an interconnected web of performance relationships that extends well beyond the type of music and the recognisable stars. This was a visualisation of a network economy. It is this mismatch between creative industry funding and the activity of the creative economy that is our focus.
Network economies are characterised by the mobility of capital flowing through the network. People and venues are like nodes in a system. They are essential elements, but they do not define the network, it is the connections that define the network. Why therefore don’t we fund connections, rather than just the nodes?
The Victorian Government has got some of the funding right, by directing funding to regional settings that can foster networks of musicians. However incrementally, funding has lost groundfor highly networked arts activities such as those in small to medium size arts organisations and artist-run collectives. The protection of large arts organisations is a windfall for established players, however smaller networks are increasingly finding it harder to survive.
Funding of large genre-specific arts organisations fails to grasp a crucial learning from 100:25:1. The most active and productive live performing musicians were those that crossed genre and worked across a number of musical traditions. Similarly, funding venues alone does not necessarily guarantee the kind of catalyst required to stimulate creative economy. The musicians in the 100:25:1 cohort played in a wide range of settings, connected to the varied types of music they were playing.
This is not an argument to stop funding nodes (people and places). If we are to really support this creative economy, we need to fund people, places and their connections. The key people in our cohort were brokers. They channeled people to other people, and likewise channeled capital through the network. These people were not necessarily the musical stars that make the most money.
Past funding models for stimulating the creative economy have been based loosely on either trickle-down economics, mentorship or ‘best-bets’. In the network economy the network dynamics need to be understood, valued and supported. In the same way that Manchester, Seattle and more recently Portland became recognised as productive creative centers for independent music, we need to appreciate that the sites for musical innovation emerge through networks. The Seattle band mapdemonstrates just how the Seattle grunge scene was not just about a few popular bands but a dense network of musicians, developing a critical mass through experimentation, friendship connections, and location. Likewise the 100:25:1 network map (see figure attached) reveals that the most connected musicians connect to other well-connected musicians. This ‘clustering coefficient’ denoted through the size of the nodes, doesn’t simply measure how many connections a person has, but how connected they are to neighbours who are well connected. We can now visualise the emergence of critical mass in collaborative work, and identify those who are part of something bigger than themselves.
For example the new music or classical musician cluster (those with blue connections) were highly connected across experimental, jazz and folk music clusters. These classically trained musicians were highly mobile and highly connected. Funding these musicians to perform only one genre of music undervalues the innovative character of the musicians and their contributions, who readily work across genre and create new music. Most of those in the blue ‘new music’ cluster have high cluster coefficients.
Finally, there has been an ongoing academic discussion about the separation between the creative industry and the creative economy. The creative economy includes the ‘community’ when conceptualising the flow of value through the creative endeavour. The creative industry on the other hand, tends to focus on the commercial, or cash-based transactional character of value. The 100:25:1 group of musicians, notably a high quality performing cohort, includes professionals, semi-professionals and those who simply do not make a living out of music. Many of these musicians probably would not be counted in the usual metrics of the creative industry. Although they contribute to the creative economy through their performances and collaborations, viewed through the lens of creative industry, the non-commercial contribution is obscured and subsequently undervalued.
Although this seems like an academic discussion, it has real implications for how governments fund live music. A creative industry approach tends to focus on venues and stars (the nodes), whereas a creative economy approach will recognise the broader contribution to the economy and will shift the focus to the network connections. Until we get this right we will still only be partial in our funding strategies.
Authors:
Ass. Prof John Fitzgerald
Adam Simmons
Acknowledgements
Thanks to those who performed in 100:25:1 and generously provided data to the study. Findings from the study were presented at the 2016 Swinburne University Social Networks Conference and in 2017 to the Australia Jazz and Improvisation Network conference.
Figure 1. The 100:25:1 network. In this figure, different colours represent different genre of music performance (purple=jazz, blue=classical; green=experimental, black=world/roots, red=mainstream/pop). The nodes are individual musicians. The size of the nodes varies according to how well the individual is connected to highly connected neighbours (their clustering coefficient). At the centre of the network is Adam Simmons.