Chained to the grassroots: the music industries and DCMS

Abstract

The paper analyses the implicit assumptions made by three key DCMS reports about how successful music products are made. I show how the reports divide the music sector into small and large producers, handing responsibility for innovation to small producers and expecting that large producers will exploit these innovations efficiently. I argue that this approach risks ignoring the realities of music production and contradicts the findings contained in the reports themselves. I conclude that a romantic idea of successful products developing from small producers may not only misrepresent and misunderstand small producers in the music industries but constrain them. IntroductionThe Department for Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) has, in recent years, published a number of reports that evaluate how the government can best support the British music sector. These reports cover both the production and consumption of music. They provide invaluable information on the current state of music in Britain and offer a rich source of data for researchers.In this paper, I show how three of these reports -Banking on a Hit (2001), SME Music Businesses (2006) and Live Music Forum (2007a) -specify a harmonious division of labour between small and large music producers in the music industries. Small music producers, the reports tell us, provide what Bennett (1980, p. 97) describes as a "place to be bad" where we can develop skills, generate new ideas and test them on an audience. If these ideas prove successful, small music producers should hand them over to large producers who can exploit them more profitably. The result, the reports assume, is both strong music industries and exciting music scenes that benefit us economically and culturally. The role for government is, accordingly, to fertilize the "invisible but organized" (Finnegan, 1989, p. 4) grassroots of music production by providing facilities, training and financial backing for local, underground and amateur music producers.Cloonan (2007) analyses the relationships between government and popular music in the UK. He suggests that policy-makers' interest in popular music and their assumptions about the music industries tend to serve the interests of large music corporations at the expensive of smaller producers. Similarly, there is much evidence indicating that the division of labour set out in the DCMS reports may hinder small producers. A recent study by Lena and Peterson (2008) finds that large music companies are perfectly capable of developing new ideas themselves and do not need to outsource innovation to small producers. Power and Hallencreutz's (2002)

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