Music Council of Australia - Medium- and long-term planning in the music sector

By Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, Editor, MCA Music in Australia Knowledge Base. Principal, Economic Strategies Pty Ltd, Oberon NSW 2787.

Entered as a background note on 18 August 2008 for the MCA summit, Australian Musical Futures: Towards 2020, Sydney, 5 September 2008.

Updated for the knowledge base, 13 September 2008.

Contents

The MCA summit

The MCA summit and future planning

Background

Other planning initiatives within the music sector

Music sector planning tools

The MCA summit

The inaugural Australian Musical Futures summit, as expected, added considerably to the knowledge and understanding of issues affecting the future of the Australian music sector. Through its sessions (moderated by McKinsey & Company's Sydney office), it generated a set of valuable ideas for future action to guide the sector towards 2020 and beyond. Equally importantly, a wide range of ideas and recommendations emerged from a consensus of almost a hundred knowledgeable people, who through the moderating process were encouraged to identify with (“own”) these ideas.

The summit was preceded by briefing papers made available to participants on the MCA website, by Ian Harvey (education), Julian Knowles (the new digital music industry), Dick Letts (legislation, regulation and infrastructure), Terry Noone (employment conditions), Huib Schippers (music in the community) and Nathan Shepherd (intellectual property issues). The wide-ranging Letts paper (originally incorporating the Noone and Shepherd contributions) gave rise to a number of articles for the knowledge base including whole of government support, arts subsidies, Australian content requirements for broadcasters, musical instruments and equipment, and freedom of expression. Virtually all the material from the briefing papers was added to the knowledge base after the summit.

The MCA summit and future planning

While the summit 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 in April 2008 (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.” (That summit is commonly called the "Rudd summit" after the new Australian Prime Minister whose idea it was.)

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 futures that were becoming ever more unpredictable. The Rudd summit report sporadically refers to scenario analysis, in connection with water (p 60), 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 shows 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, including the MCA summit.

Background

The design of the MCA music summit 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 various parts of the music sector. By April 2008, 22 useful analyses had been received. All are now on this knowledge base. Making all this possible, a previous proposal to update a purely numerical database for the MCA had been significantly extended, resulting in the present knowledge base, containing narrative as well as statistical analysis. It is about to enter its third year of development as a major effort depending on the contributions of many people. It is planned to achieve reasonably complete coverage of the music sector by September 2009.

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

The music summit will result in a series of stated ambitions and goals, priority themes, and top ideas (as in the final report of the Rudd Summit);
The descriptive narratives and statistical reviews in the current knowledge base are bringing together specialised knowledge from across the music sector; and
The recent SWOT analyses are helping to identify issues facing musical activities in Australia.

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 structural model of the music sector shown here is discussed in detail elsewhere in this section of the knowledge base.

An adequate statistical database is an important medium- and long-term planning tool which is to a large extent missing in Australia. When the statistics are not part of a larger effort, such as the gathering of overseas trade data, official statistical collections on music-related topics 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 in the culture area. Funding is scarce, and the culture element may be losing out to sporting topics, though this remains to be properly investigated from ABS records.

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 statistical data (a fact that was repeatedly brought up in the various sessions of the music summit). Our 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 treated 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 (again very much a topic of the MCA summit, in particular its education section);
bringing arts into schools through practitioners in residence (including a national mentoring program funded by philanthropic funds and tax incentives);
and the one already mentioned: 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 The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millennium (Platform Papers No 16, January 2008), has proposed the creation and implementation of a developmental plan for the jazz sector.

The National Review of School Music Education (NRSME) in 2005 initiated an important planning effort primarily by providing a basis for assessing the considerable gaps that exist in the provision of school music education, in particular in the government and Catholic school systems. Ian Harvey writes in his briefing paper for the MCA summit in September 2008, Australian Musical Futures: Towards 2020:

"The NRSME and the activities that have followed it have tended to have a much stronger focus on primary education. This has not been with the intention of diminishing secondary music education but rather the view that if music was significantly better provisioned and resourced in the primary sector a number of benefits would flow into the secondary system. In short, the notion that a rising tide floats all boats."

Music sector planning tools

The amount of information which has become available over the past few years is providing a firmer 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 planning for the music sector will benefit from:

The ideas coming from the MCA summit
Recent SWOT analysis of particular sections of the music sector
The emerging MCA knowledge base
The unique accumulated knowledge of MCA councillors and staff, and other members of the music sector
Analysis of the available 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 the Rudd and MCA summits. 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 sometimes memorised as 'STEEP' after the initial letter of each element: socio-cultural, technological, ecological/environmental, economic, and political/legislative, 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). Perhaps the recommendations following from the music summit could form part of the basis for the favourable 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.

Though the Australian music sector is in a reasonably good position to start constructing scenarios for planning purposes, the sector is highly complex. We may hope that some unifying influences emerge from the detailed analysis of the music summit to help get the complexity into a workable perspective. The fact that the summit brought together a wide range of interests from across the music sector to work cooperatively is a favourable sign that this may happen.

The purpose of this note is to introduce the concept of using scenarios to develop policies for the future of the music sector, 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.

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