CULTURAL POLICY AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

7. CULTURAL POLICY AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Does this mean then that local authorities should keep well out of the music industry? In Manchester, the hands-off (Darwinian) approach has been strongly voiced by Anthony Wilson (Factory, Hacienda, In The City):

”You know, it’s very difficult to put money into this kind of industry — how do you help? ...There’s very little you can do. It’s like this building a municipal rehearsal room, you know — fuck it! The argument being, if you can decide which ten bands out of the 1,000 deserve the rehearsal room, don’t be a Councillor, be a fucking record company, because you’d be a millionaire. Because, you know, the whole point of music is that everybody does it, everybody does it, and therefore it’s impossible really to do anything.You know, one of the strange things, since the music industry comes from by and large ... from the radical left or whatever ... one is aware of pop music’s Darwinian inheritance in that it succeeds and it’s as if you have to have that winnowing-out process.You know, you have to believe in what you’re doing, to actually struggle and to get the equipment, gigs, find a manager”.

Dave Haslam, a Manchester DJ agrees: ”You know, ‘Madchester’ happened anyway. ‘Madchester’ would have happened anyway. Those guys knew what they were doing ... and if the Buzzcocks and New Order and the Smiths, and the Hacienda, and the Boardwalk and whoever else can rise out of nothing, then anybody else can.”

This chimes very discordantly with other city governments and public agencies who, for various reasons, are increasingly interested in ‘doing something’ for the cultural industries in general and the music industry in particular. In some respects, Wilson may be right in sounding a warning. Local authorities are very much attracted to the music industry — as a highly globalised industry, it seems to sound the charge for new, forward-looking cities. Music can be glamorous with a huge local PR potential — local stars being used to promote various initiatives. Music scenes are used by cities (often long after the event) — the iconographic value of streets and venues associated with particular events or scenes inevitably tempt cities into inappropriate labelling (jazz quarter, bohemian quar- ter) and crass tourism (Cohen and Atkinson, 1995). The music industry often seems to hold out huge wealth potential — being amongst the most visibly lucrative cultural indus- tries and among the UK’s top export earners generally. It is also widely felt that, for what- ever reason (use of English, links to the USA, unemployment, ‘natural creativity’, etc.) Britain is well placed to take advantage of this almost instant access to a global arena/ marketplace — though the unequal distribution of this wealth, between and within local areas, is not always recognised. Moreover, music production is widespread and arguably accessible to even (especially?) the most excluded groups. Music strategies are often seen as low on expense and skill and high on enthusiasm and creativity — as opposed to the high investment, skills and logistics required in the film industry, for example. Moreover, such spending has a more ‘populist’ profile than traditional or other cultural industry investment — thus is easier to justify politically.The accessibility of music-making as well as its widespread, quotidian consumption tends also to make musical success much more

emblematic of the locality than other cultural production is. Although there are local ‘suc- cess stories’ in other cultural industries sectors (actors, films, designers) music seems to ‘express’ a locality through sound, image and discourse in a way that is quite powerful. So local authorities are more and more interested in the industry — the question is can they do anything? The response lies at two levels. Wilson would want Manchester to keep to its hands-off policy whilst ‘removing barriers’. This includes flexible planning and licensing regulations; it means organising public transport and other, traditionally ‘non cul- tural’ initiatives. These are quite general demands, but crucially important to the success of any cultural strategy in either city. On the other hand,Wilson thinks that the things the city does do — commissioning buildings, public spaces, festivals — need to be ‘inspira- tional’, that Manchester needs to move beyond the provincial to occupy a place in Northern England similar to Barcelona in Catalonia. In order to do this, it needs to raise its vision and to listen to, respond to, use those local cultural producers who have been globally (or at least nationally) successful in their own sphere. This, despite being couched in iconoclastic anti-policy language, is in fact a cultural policy. But in the end the anti-policy language has undermined the evolution of such a policy. As we saw above, the local music sector’s distrust of intervention fitted well with the dom- inant policy discourse in the city. Manchester’s regeneration is almost exclusively focused on buildings, with a strong sense of laissez-faire with regards to the cultural industries sec- tor. This discourse stems from a very powerful coalition of planners, public and private regeneration intermediaries, and large/medium property developers. Heavily dependent on city-brokered deals with national agencies such as English Partnerships, Lottery/ Millennium Funds and European Structural Funds, along with the city’s (limited) financial and planning powers, this group is strongly laissez-faire when it comes to cultural industries and other economic development areas. It points to the strength of the cultural sector in Manchester (Manchester has the largest cultural sector in terms of employment out- side of London, MIPC/MCC, 1997) and in particular to the language of the music sector as confirmation of this approach. However, at a local level the relationship between the cultural industries and urban regeneration interests around property development is clearly fraught with tensions. A hands-off approach can ultimately allow a property market to price out small-scale cultural producers. This may not just impact on a particular area but on the ecosystem of the city as a whole. This can be seen in the case of the NQ. Whilst the city were willing to use the notion of ‘the creative quarter’ in its literature it never bought into the vision of the area as a cul- tural industries quarter.The NQ was taken under the wing of the Planning Department and Chief Executives — concerned mostly with property-led regeneration. Economic Initiatives, the department driving a new cultural production strategy, was kept at arm’s length. The local Northern Quarter Association (NQA) was given basic funding (£30,000 per year, from a Single Regeneration Budget (SRB)) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) money was used to support building refurbishment and a public art project and as leverage for new building investment.The major indicator of success was new busi- nesses in the area and new investment in the built stock.There was no linkage of a NQ regeneration strategy to the cultural sector other than to note the suitability of the small- er lettings in the area to such cultural businesses. At no point was the NQA encouraged to look to business development/training funds (ERDF, ESF, SRB, etc.) to support cultur- al businesses, as was happening across the region and is happening in Sheffield. What developments there were came from the Further and Higher Education establishments, but again, there was no co-ordination around a central set of objectives, and their invest- ments were registered in terms of building refurbishment. Whilst large sums were being

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drawn down by organisations who claimed to be delivering to the cultural industries sector, the NQA was left to ask around the council for some money to paint their offices. Some of the basic demands of cultural businesses in the NQ were improvements in the physical environment (lighting, pavements, transport, parking, traffic congestion, etc.) and general initiatives in marketing the area through publicity, signage, events, linkage with more central activities, etc. Whilst a certain amount of investment has gone into infra- structure (though nothing like the levels in other areas of the centre), the marketing of the area has been either opportunist (mentioning it when promoting the ‘vibrancy’ of the city) or left to the poorly-resourced NQA. A marketing of the area at a strategic level, as seen in Sheffield, has never been remotely attempted.The NQA, whilst seen as a ‘good thing’ amongst those who talk of partnership with the community, has in fact a low polit- ical profile.Thus despite long and loud opposition, buses continue to be routed through the main streets in huge and increasing volume. The issue of licensing, as with Sheffield, is instructive.

A failure to deal with long-running issues of gangs, organised crime, protection and violence associated with Manchester’s night life and clubs has led to two prominent clubs closing in the Northern Quarter. Although Manchester’s night life has been a central plank of the city’s re-imaging, and a generally laissez-faire approach has allowed club culture to flourish in the last decade, ‘non-intervention’ and a lack of co-ordinated action from different policy areas is now threatening that cultural activity. But the conflict between property-led development and small cultural businesses seems set to take centre stage. A number of recent large-scale developments have seen the familiar story of rising rents loom.The growth of residential developments is causing con- flicts with music venues and bars.This is repeated elsewhere in a city that promotes city centre living and the ‘24-Hour City’ with little overall co-ordination between them. The latter is used to sell an image of the city, the reality of which may not be to the tastes of those who move in. Currently, residential usage is at a premium here as in other ‘regen- erated cities’, and this pushes small cultural uses out in a now almost classic pattern (Zukin, 1982). This lack of any cultural quarter strategy can be seen in a major new NQ development on a site of a car park and surrounding buildings owned by the city. Rather than used as strategic elements in a regeneration strategy managed by the city, the site is to be sold off via an overall development plan set by a private developer chosen through compet- itive bidding.The NQA, once a potential community development organisation, is now to

be consulted as a ‘voice’ of the local community. The developers’ brief stresses cultural usage, but the inevitable tendency will be towards ‘cultural’ clients who can draw down lottery and other public funding, i.e., the subsidised sector.This will leave the music indus- try out. The first act of the new developers appears to be the eviction of small cultural users in favour of a residential development (interview with Northern Quarter Association). This growing conflict between property development and the cultural sector threatens to be damaging to the NQ and to the city as a whole. In the absence of the major insti- tutional players — which, as we have said, in the music industry are located in London — it is these clusters which provide a key infrastructure for the local industry, as well as

a source of new talent for the national and global industry. But more generally, these developments indicate that whilst a local authority cannot conjure up an industry out of nothing, it can let it disappear by failing to support it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------