This initial Australian Musical Futures summit will add considerably to the knowledge and understanding of issues affecting the future of the Australian music sector. Through its mediated sessions, it will at the very least generate a set of valuable ideas for future action to guide the sector towards 2020 and beyond. Equally importantly, the ideas and recommendations will emerge from a consensus of more than a hundred knowledgeable people, who through the mediating process are encouraged to identify with ("own") these ideas.

Medium- and long-term planning in the music sector

Note prepared for Australian Musical Futures: Towards 2020, Sydney, 5 September 2008. Entered 18 August 2008 by Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, Editor, MCA Music in Australia Knowledge Base. Principal, Economic Strategies Pty Ltd, Oberon NSW.

Introduction

This initial Australian Musical Futures summit will add considerably to the knowledge and understanding of issues affecting the future of the Australian music sector. Through its mediated sessions, it will at the very least generate a set of valuable ideas for future action to guide the sector towards 2020 and beyond. Equally importantly, the ideas and recommendations will emerge from a consensus of more than a hundred knowledgeable people, who through the mediating process are encouraged to identify with ("own") these ideas.

While the recommendations will form an important part of the basis for medium- and long-term planning in the music sector, the identification of goals, themes and ideas cannot by itself provide the whole basis. In the words of the introduction to the final report of the Australia 2020 Summit (p 3): "The years ahead will undoubtedly throw up many unforeseen challenges and unimagined opportunities. Australians need to keep discussing, debating and generating new ideas and perspectives for formulating the national strategies and solutions of tomorrow."

The technique of scenario planning, adopted by growing numbers of business, government and other organisations over the past 40 years, was developed to cope with ever more unpredictable futures. The 2020 summit in April only sporadically referred to scenario analysis, in connection with water (p 60 of the final report), climate change (p 105), and most elaborately in connection with defence and security (p 356).

Scenario planning deals with what cannot be foreseen by setting a credible framework, from ‘worst case scenarios' to be avoided through appropriate medium- and long-term planning, to more benign cases to be planned for. The last section of this note attempts to define the fortunate position of the Australian music sector in regard to informed long-term scenario planning due to the breadth of knowledge it has accumulated from various sources - which will now include this summit.

Background

The design of Australian Musical Futures: Towards 2020 was inspired by the April 2008 summit which the Rudd Labor Government organised soon after being elected. Before then, however, the MCA decided at its September 2007 Assembly to conduct a series of ‘SWOT' analyses (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) of segments of the music sector. By April 2008, 21 useful analyses had been received. Furthermore, a previous proposal to update a numerical database for the MCA had been significantly extended to develop a proper knowledge base, containing verbal descriptions as well as statistical analysis. This knowledge base has been under development for the past two years; it is a major effort depending on the contributions of many people, and is planned to achieve reasonably complete coverage of the music sector by September 2009.

As a result of all these efforts, we are building up knowledge in a number of ways:

· This summit will result in a series of stated ambitions and goals, priority themes, and top ideas (assuming the concepts will be similar to those at the creativity section according to the final report of the Australia 2020 Summit);

· Through the descriptive narratives and statistical reviews in the Music in Australia Knowledge Base; and

· More recently through the SWOT analyses which will themselves be incorporated into the knowledge base.

Even before starting to tap the great accumulated knowledge of MCA councillors and staff, these sources provide a massive reservoir of information to employ in formulating policy recommendations for the Australian music sector.

Another important background is A Statistical Framework for the Music Sector (2005), written by the author in collaboration with Richard Letts for the Cultural Ministers' Council. The study redefined the music sector to encompass all activities associated with music, either through a creative performance stream or in support of active creative music making. The basic model for the music sector as we defined it is shown above. It is discussed in detail in MCA's Music in Australia Knowledge Base.

An adequate statistical database is an important medium- and long-term planning tool but is to a large extent absent in Australia. When the statistics are not part of a larger effort, such as the gathering of overseas trade data, collections are few and far between. Recording and associated industries, and industries such as the performing arts, are subject to infrequent collections by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Some economic statistics were last collected for the fiscal year 1995-96. Despite the existence of a branch of the ABS, specialising in culture and leisure statistics, not much is happening. Funding is scarce.

One of the basic aims of the report for the Cultural Ministers' Council was to identify gaps in the statistics available to measure the music sector - gaps which remain very large indeed. The music sector is not well served with official statistical data. The report set out a recommended five-year program for rectifying this problem, with the following priority areas:

· Creators, performers, bands and orchestras (as the above graph suggests, the report treated creation as the central feature of the music sector, while other reports have tended to concentrate more narrowly on the recording industry and to a large extent treat performers and groups as inputs into that industry)

· Live music performance across the board of genres from classical to contemporary music, and including Indigenous music and musicians as a core element

· Production of and trade in recorded music and other music goods and services

· Intellectual property flows, domestically and internationally

· Use of recorded music through media such as broadcasting and film, and including digital delivery as well as a range of new and more established uses of music

· Last but not least, value added in primary, secondary and post-secondary music education and other support activities listed in the right-hand part of the graph.

The statistical framework report recommended the building up of statistics capable of measuring the true economic contribution of the music sector to the Australian economy - what is called "music GDP" on the graph. To reach this aim, it recommended a five-year program at an approximate cost of $1 million. It also suggested sources such as the Australian Research Council as possible alternatives to the ABS; interestingly, one of the ideas of the creativity panel at the 2020 summit in April (p 270) was to "put creativity on the list of Australian national research priorities as a way of facilitating research on the subject, including through Australian Research Council grants." Assuming statistical research is part of this, it suggests going beyond the ABS for funding.

Another priority theme identified by the creativity panel of the 2020 summit was the need to link creative arts and education, "embedding creativity in education" through the introduction of a national curriculum to include arts subjects, bringing arts into schools through practitioners in residence (including a national mentoring program funded by philanthropic funds and tax incentives), and acknowledging creativity as a national research priority with access to R&D and the ARC. (p 297)

Given that the ultimate aim of the recommended statistical program is to measure a "music GDP", all parts of the music sector need statistics. However, it may be possible to set priorities for the sequence of undertakings involving the ABS, to include initially:

· Economic data relating to creators (composers, songwriters, performers and groups)

· Comprehensive data on school music education as the primary driver of musical development

· Economic data on music businesses including recording and related activities, and music, opera and other performing arts, clearly defining each segment (this collection would update statistics now up to 12 years old).

The Australian Bureau of Statistics is not the only actual or potential source of data, but it is the most prominent as well as the one with statutory power to obtain data, and one that has been seriously under-funded as far as the music sector is concerned. The sector is conservatively estimated to be worth about $7 billion, and given that statistics are a valuable medium- and long-term planning tool it would seem reasonable to spend in the order of $1 million over five years to refine our knowledge. But it seems that official thinking needs to undergo a sea change to bring this about.

Other planning initiatives within the music sector

The Contemporary Music Working Group (CMWG) is comprised of representative organisations in what we might call the music industry or music business, primarily recording and publishing plus some live music. It has been developing long-term goals for the contemporary music industry in what it terms a "2020 type process" over recent years, and has taken a proposal to government for a broad analysis of the activities it covers.

Peter Rechniewski, in Currency Press's Platform Papers, has proposed the creation and implementation of a developmental plan for the jazz sector.

Music sector planning tools

The amount of information which has become available over the past few years is providing a firm basis for medium- and long-term planning for the music sector. Admittedly, much of it is qualitative rather than quantitative as the statistics are less than ideal. In summary, the music sector will benefit from:

· The ideas coming from this music summit

· Recent SWOT analysis of particular sections of the music sector

· The emerging MCA knowledge base

· The unique accumulated knowledge of MCA members and staff, and other members of the music sector

· The existence of some statistical data (to enable contrasting narratives of the future to be augmented with numbers).

This amount of knowledge makes it relatively straightforward (not easy) to develop a range of scenarios for medium- and long-term planning purposes, with an assumed time horizon to 2020 to stick with the framework set in this summit. Briefly, these scenarios need to be sufficiently wide-ranging to cover what we may call the plausible possible futures. The usual number of alternative futures or scenarios is three or four, for instance:

· A "business-as-usual" scenario attempting to project the consequences of current policies and institutional patterns

· A worst-case scenario assuming a range of adverse impacts. Scenario analysis is based on a broad range of factors: socio-cultural, technological, ecological or environmental, economic and political, comprising the domestic and international environment of the Australian music sector

· A benign scenario based on the same broad range of factors combining to provide greater assistance to the sector than has been the case to date (distinguishing it favourably from the "business-as-usual" scenario).

Each of these scenarios must be seen as equally likely to occur, since the rationale for scenario planning is that the future is essentially unpredictable. Each scenario must also be seen as plausible to gain acceptance. It is also an art to achieve internal consistency and avoid contradictions which detract from the credibility of the approach.

While the Australian music sector is in a good position to start constructing scenarios for planning purposes, the sector is highly complex. We may hope that some unifying influences emerge from the summit to help get the complexity into a workable perspective.

The purpose of this note is to introduce the concept of using scenarios to develop policies for the future, not to go into great detail on how to develop the approach - that will still take a significant effort including possible interactions in workshops or similar instruments. But it has worked in many other contexts, and as noted above, the knowledge that is being accumulated under the auspices of the MCA provides a formidable basis for development.

References

Australia 2020 Summit (April 2008): http://www.australia2020.gov.au/

Hans Hoegh-Guldberg and Richard Letts, A Statistical Framework for the Music Sector (2005), for the Statistics Working Group of the Cultural Ministers' Council: http://www.culturaldata.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/59155/A_Statistical_Framework_for_the_Music_Sector.pdf

Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, The music sector defined, MCA Music in Australia Knowledge Base (2008): http://www.mca.org.au/web/component/option,com_kb/task,article/article,8/

Contemporary Music Working Group: http://www.simpsons.com.au/cmwg.htm

Peter Rechniewski, The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millennium (Platform Papers No 16, January 2008). http://www.currencyhouse.org.au/pages/pp_issue_16.html.