The Movement Economy Of The Music Industry, Interrupted
COVID-19 and the impact it has had on the music industry will be a subject of great interest and study going forward. Already in Canada industry associations and funding bodies have leapt into action, doing the necessary work to keep the businesses that drive industry activity solvent during this unprecedented interruption. In the USA organisations like Music Policy Forum are convening local government officials weekly to strategise, trying to mitigate the impacts of this pandemic on local music ecosystems. Since the beginning of of the month when SXSW was cancelled, the cascading effects across the industry were seismic. The touring business — for the foreseeable future — is not a business; my colleagues who operate small/medium sized venues, DJ’s or are musicians who operate at the local or regional level — the understated warp and weft of the music industry — have had all of their projections decimated.
In my roles as local policymaker and party rocker, life has become way more challenging as I consider things both from the perspective of a local independent business / artist who has to figure out how to document and stem the losses while staying connected to audience, and also as someone responsible for strategizing a response to the industry’s crisis within the local government. This is the serious work of right now. But stepping back a bit as an urbanist, I think it’s worthwhile reflecting on why this pandemic has had such deleterious effects on the music industry, obvious as it may seem at first.
It’s an important though under considered fact that what makes this public health crisis so problematic when compared to others that the industry has survived— AIDS, SARS, Bird Flu, Mad Cow — is the degree to which the way that it spreads interrupts the movement of bodies. While the aforementioned epidemics did major human damage, what we understood about the way they spread didn’t lead to restricted movement. COVID-19 has been a double whammy. That part is obvious, but it belies the more subtle fact: large parts of our local and international financial economy are totally predicted on a local and global movement economy.
Even on Friedman’s flat earth, this is a fundamental function of the space / society relationship in cities: facilitating the kinds of planned and unplanned socioeconomic interactions that make up a city’s society, economy and culture by configuring space into hierarchical street networks + land uses. As Hillier says, Space Is The Machine — we tacitly create our communities, society, economy and culture with and through these deep spatial network structures and the interactions they produce. Those generative spatial configurations are a critical part of what a city is for. The other critical part of the city making process is all of us socializing space; actually using the network, going to and from/being in these places and fulfilling the promise of the planned land use, together. We make it by doing it too. As Bordieu says, “Though social space is not a physical space, it tends to realize itself in a more or less complete and accurate fashion in that space”.
The music industry is both a set of socio-economic and spatial relationships. In fact, by analysing the latter there’s a lot to be learned about the former. By doing so it also becomes more clear why this crisis is so devastating to those who operate the local spaces where the music industry happens. My dissertation — which I discussed recently on the wonderful Innovating Music podcast — focussed on quantitatively describing the relationships between the deep structures of the urban street network and the music industry land-uses in two London neighbourhoods through a value chain lens. By doing so I was able to identify patterns that show how local venues leverage their spatial relationships to local communities in different ways than the larger venues do. One way to look at the research is to say that it demonstrated the degree to which, for these venues, their position in the spatial network can be leveraged as a resource, as it relates to the flow of bodies. The arresting of that flow puts these local venues at particular risk.
The challenge of right now for all of us — but especially my colleagues working in music locally / regionally — is how to adjust to this new spatial paradigm? If space can’t be the machine right now, what is? For my colleagues in local and regional government, the post-pandemic challenge will be to protect those vulnerable community spaces, and to take seriously the spatial fundamentals of community, society, economy and culture as we plan going forward + in our preparations for the next interruption.
