Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee
Oral evidence: Live Music, HC 733
Tuesday 30 October 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 30 October 2018.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Damian Collins (Chair); Clive Efford; Paul Farrelly; Simon Hart; Julian Knight; Brendan O’Hara; Rebecca Pow; Jo Stevens.
Questions 306 - 358
Witnesses
I: Jane Beese, Head of Music, the Roundhouse, Tom Gray, Member of Gomez, Naomi Pohl, Assistant General Secretary, Musicians’ Union, and DJ Target, DJ and author.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Jane Beese, Tom Gray, Naomi Pohl and DJ Target.
Q306 Chair: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this further evidence session of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee as part of our inquiry into live music. One of the things the Committee has been interested in looking at throughout the inquiry so far has been opportunities for younger people to enter the music industry. I would like to start by asking each member of the panel for your assessment of that and, in particular, whether you feel that the route into the industry is as easy now as it has been in the past. Are there new challenges that younger people face, and would you define what those challenges are? Perhaps we could start with DJ Target and just work along the panel.
DJ Target: Hi everyone. In 2018, the climate we are in now, in the music industry, especially the music industry that I represent—pretty much the urban side of things, which ranges from grime music through to hip hop, R&B, drum and bass, dance or Afro beat—we are seeing a whole generation of young new artists coming in, and they are coming into an industry that is a lot different from when I came up 15, 20 years ago. We have the internet and social media, which now provides all these artists and creators with a direct route to their audience. You are cutting out a lot of the middle men. Artists are able to build up their own fan bases via social media. They are able to have their own merchandise, put on their own shows and release music, all independently. I would like to believe that the music industry is now wide open for artists, not just coming in to be recognised and signed by a major label and to go down that route, but I think there are as many or more opportunities than ever for artists from that independent sector.
It is the best time we have had for creatives and musical talent coming out of this country, and I think the last four or five years have been testament to that, seeing the international success of some of these artists coming through, whether it is a pop act, a grime act, like a Stormzy, or some of these acts that you cannot really put into a box, genre-wise. I would like to believe it is as open and as full of opportunities as it has ever been.
There are also challenges that come with that, like lack of venues and lack of opportunities to perform live. I know we don’t have to do it anymore, but form 696—thank goodness it is now gone—was a huge hurdle for a lot of these artists to get over. We are not seeing it in form 696 but I still feel that there is, in certain areas, discrimination towards certain types of artists and certain types of live events. I heard recently that at the Wireless Festival, which happens every year, artists are now being told that they cannot use any bad language or wear “offensive clothing.” I feel that is one of the many challenges that artists, especially those from an urban background, are still facing. It is kind of like a gift and a curse; we have all this opportunity, which has now been made by social media and the internet, with opportunities for independent artists, but we are still facing some of those challenges when it comes to those artists wanting to go out and perform live or go around the country and really connect with their fans.
Naomi Pohl: One of our key concerns is around music education. I would agree that if you can go down the DIY route as an artist, then you do have more avenues available to you than was previously the case. We are concerned that music education has become quite patchy across the country. There are a few key issues. Over the last 10 years that I have worked for the Musicians’ Union, I have personally seen our members’ terms and conditions eroded in music services, in hubs and schools. They were moved off teacher’s pay and conditions, if they had qualified teacher status, moved on to self-employed contracts and then moved on to zero-hours contracts. A lot of them are now teaching privately, which obviously is a bit of a barrier for students who just do not have the family income to pay for lessons and buy an instrument.
There are hubs that are doing a fantastic job and there are schools that are brilliant, but it tends to be where individuals are really passionate about music. Obviously you do not get that everywhere, unfortunately. We would like to see some changes, perhaps with Ofsted prioritising the arts—a school can only be outstanding if it has some form of arts and music provision—and obviously more subsidised music education for kids from poorer backgrounds.
We have just recently done a study that shows that all kids have an equal interest in learning music, but you are far more likely to learn an instrument and go on to be a professional musician if you have some sort of family wealth. You have to have a total family income of at least £28,000 to be able to afford to pay for music lessons. That is obviously problematic.
Music venues are another issue. The situation in communities where you have music venues closing, lack of rehearsal space, lack of recording studios; again there are going to be financial barriers, and music venues, even though we are delighted that the agent of change principle is being introduced, that is not the only barrier for music venues. A lot of them close because of the high business rates. We would like something to be done about that.
Chair: We do not need it all in one go. We have time; don’t worry. Tom.
Tom Gray: I came through in the 1990s and it was a very different world. I have lived through the almost complete collapse of the music industry and then its rebirth in the streaming era. For me, especially regarding live music, what we have watched happen over the past few years, obviously with the closure of many, many venues, I think we are looking at severe regional disparities in terms of what opportunities are available to young people. Building a small audience before you travel and find the world is incredibly important because access to income is obviously the key thing if you are going to build a career. You cannot just go on the internet and make money straightaway; that is a fallacy.
A lot of kids are spending so much time on their digital footprint that one worries that they are not getting in front of people. I also worry that urban centres get far too much of the money that is available, so you get incredible saturation in certain areas, which leads to diminishing returns for those clubs and venues. I feel that there is sort of a class of young musician for whom there would be no management available, because managers would not be interested in taking them on because they would not make them any money. Promoters would not be interested in promoting their shows, because they would not make any money.
Back when I started, we had a thing called the dole, and that did give you a very small amount of money that meant you could keep going. Now I wonder where the opportunity is and where the money is going to come from if they are not good at filling in forms to get grants or are not university educated. How are you going to get into the music industry? That is my main concern.
Jane Beese: Good morning, everyone. I am sure that a lot of you have been to the Roundhouse to see a show—I see some nods. Has anybody been into the Roundhouse studios? When we reopened the Roundhouse 13 years ago, we knew we had to build this big commercial space, but we also created a suite of facilities for young people, for 11 to 25-year-olds, and we ran projects in 24 different spaces that focus on not only music but performing arts and broadcasting digital as well. This is a little known fact about the Roundhouse; most people turn up, go to a gig in the big hall and then go home. At the moment we are working with about 6,000 young people. It is very much part of our ethos that we deliberately go out and look for young people who are not born with what I call a cultural silver spoon in their mouth. The statistics, which we work on—the postcode thing, which in itself is not ideal—show that 52% of the young people we are working with are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I am very proud of that model.
A lot of organisations regionally—and we are part of several networking groups—could learn from that. One of the venue issues is that a lot of the small venues operate commercially only for three or four hours a day, so they need to learn how to use their spaces a bit differently.
Just picking up on what some of the other panellists said. The music industry that I started in 25 years ago is very different from what it is now. The digital age is brilliant, as Target says, but it can be a double-edged sword as well. People do not pay for music any more. That is a generational thing that I still find appalling and abhorrent. The pie for your average artist has changed from being something where you will earn money from your recorded music into something where more and more emphasis has to lie with the money you earn in the live sphere.
On the one hand, we do have incredible success stories still coming out of this country. Let us not forget our amazing rich history and legacy in music, but we have our Adeles, our Stormzys and our Ed Sheerans and then there is an enormous gap. I think there needs to be an enormous U-turn in attitudes to how valuable music, art and culture is in this country. We have always been lacking in that since I was a teenager and decided to take a history degree rather than an art degree because I thought that was a more sensible career route. That is something we need to tackle collectively, appreciating that the creative industries—not just being the artists on stage but the 90%-plus other jobs that exist in that industry—are valuable. Historically, those things have not been taught.
The manager of an artist is often the fifth member of the gang who could not play drums, or the tour manager or whatever. There have never really been proper progression routes. I think there are now and the industry collectively is becoming more political about how it talks about what its issue are. It is a different age and it is good and bad, but it needs more collective recognition about the value of culture and what that looks like in the fairly difficult future that I think we are all facing.
Q307 Chair: I will pick up on a couple of points people have raised before bringing in the other members. Tom, I read that Noel Gallagher said that he did not think they could have started Oasis now in the way they did, largely because performance and rehearsal space, which was very important to their start, is no longer available in the way it was. Thinking back to your experience with Gomez, do you think you guys could start out now in the way you did then?
Tom Gray: It is hard to say. Possibly. We are strangely a prototype for a kind of thing that came along. We did a lot of it ourselves; we recorded ourselves, we got out there ourselves, and we sent out the tapes that we made ourselves. It is a funny thing, with the kinds of opportunities that came to us. People say you make your own luck. We were without the connections that you can make by going to rehearsal rooms—for us it was in Sheffield—and meeting people with connections in the record industry and getting your tapes to them. Whether or not that exists now, I could not say; I do not feel like it does exist in the same way.
I think that people do not necessarily realise that the major labels, in particular, used to have development deals and used to have a system where you could go to them and they would give you £5,000 and you could buy a van and drive around and you could get better. They would have first refusal on you when you were done with that. Those kinds of deals completely disappeared when the record industry was on its knees, in the mid-2000s through to 2010 and 2011, when it got really bad, and they have never come back. I think that is a very strange set of circumstances.
It would be very interesting to look at how and why the major labels are not incentivised to get back into development. That is where a lot of that money used to come from. There is now a lot more money in the business than there ever was, but somehow that is not finding its way back down to the bottom. In fact, that is what you find across the board. part of the problem that small promoters have is that they start with a young band, they promote them, they get to a new level—and I am sure you have heard this from other people—but then the band goes up to the next promoter and then they are gone. That promoter cannot make money from them ever again. There is no reason for them to invest. You constantly have to look at why the big players are not incentivised to help the bottom-up system. I do not know if that answers your question about whether it will be possible or not. It is all down to luck really.
Q308 Chair: I have an interesting comparison with football and music in that regard, because football is also a private commercial enterprise—football clubs are private companies—but they invest a huge amount into talent identification and nurturing, to the extent that every premier league club has 20 eight-year-olds on their books that they will develop through until they are 18. A very small percentage will make it; most won’t. Nevertheless, they fund that themselves.
Tom Gray: There are many reasons why the digital age has not helped young artists. One of the many ways it has not helped is that now what you have is a system where the bigger labels, where the most value is in the market, are just waiting to see if something pops up: “Oh look, they have a million followers on Instagram, they must be worth investing in.” Or, “They already have a streaming hit, so we will buy hit.” The idea of long-term investment in their own pipeline has more or less disappeared.
There also used to be a thing called tour support, which was very common, where you signed to a label and they gave you money to go and play losing gigs around the world, which we all did for years. You ended up having to pay that money back through recoupment, so we all ended up with massive debt to the record companies, of course, but they gave you money to just go and play losing shows to get in front of people because they recognised that unless you were in front of people you didn’t have a chance. That is gone.
Q309 Chair: I have a question for DJ Target, but I will ask it to you first. Do you think it matters where in the country you are starting out?
Tom Gray: Of course, 100%.
Q310 Chair: Do you think there is a bias towards London because of the size of London and the possibilities in the industry?
Tom Gray: There is a huge bias. Look, there are so many great things and great organisations out there that are involved in diversity and helping people who are from poorer backgrounds. These projects tend to get money to open centres and I do worry about some kid in the Black Country, in some small town, going, “I want to be involved in music” and there is no evidence that is in any way real for them. I do not think it is. I think most of the data on this is nonsense and anecdotal, but the cohort of musicians I came through with were probably—more than half of us—working-class or lower middle-class kids. Now 80% of the musicians I meet come from private education. That is just the way of it.
Q311 Chair: DJ Target, in the previous session a number of people mentioned that they thought the grime scene has been hugely successful and that new artists have been able to develop their own audience and then scale up. Do you think it helps being in London because there is just a much bigger pool of potential listeners in close proximity, or do you think the success of some London artists in breaking through could be replicated elsewhere in the country?
DJ Target: I agree with a lot of what Tom was saying. Within the grime scene and the sub genres that fall around it, I feel like that—I wouldn’t call it a myth because it is still very much a real thing—but it used to be that if you are not from London you have no chance, because no one is really going to hear you. You have to drive 200 miles or get a train from wherever it is you are from to be in the mix, to be physically in front of the record labels, in front of fans at shows, where the big shows are happening in London. Now we are seeing a slight change and it is back to being about the digital age, and as much as it is not allowing artists to develop themselves in a physical sense and get out in front of their audience or their supporters, what they can do is build a fan base online.
You see acts like Bugzy Malone, who is probably one of the biggest grime acts to come out of the UK in the last couple of years, and he is from Manchester, and it is happening in cities around the country. I think it is becoming slightly easier for artists from that urban/grime background to get in among it without having to be based in London. A lot of them are still from the bigger cities—the Birminghams, Manchesters and what not—but you are starting to see an influx of artists beginning to come through, even from the stuff I play on my radio show. I do a new music show Monday to Thursday, which is strictly about brand new music and new artists, and three or four years ago we were probably playing 70% London artists, and now it could be 40% London artists and 60% artists sprinkled all around the country.
I guess there are still those upsides and downsides of the internet era, but I feel like the internet has definitely helped with the scene that I came through. When we came through 15 years ago, I was also part of a group, Roll Deep, that helped pioneer the grime scene in the early days. We didn’t have YouTube or Instagram. It was literally like Tom said; you had to be in front of people. We had to take our tape to get heard, to then get a pirate radio set, to then connect with a local audience and then hopefully scale that up. Now that is being done through clicks of buttons and that is a big help to artists.
However, what I am seeing is that some of these artists, like you said, will have a streaming hit and a record label will come in and buy that streaming hit for £100,000. Then the artist is suddenly on stage in front of people and their stage performance is terrible because they have had no physical experience of getting in front of people. I am seeing that a lot. It is almost like artists are having to catch up to their own success, which is something that I think needs to be changed, bringing back the venues, the rehearsal spaces, just that energy within live music that was here during the 1990s and early 2000s. I think artists are definitely lacking and losing out on that. As much as they are gaining on the streaming side and being able to develop a fan base where they can sell merchandise and even go on tours, for some of them when they actually hit the stage it is like, “Oh, how do I actually perform now”. Again, it is a double-edged sword.
Q312 Chair: Tom Gray, when you started out presumably a record label would have talent scouts that would see people performing and sign you on the basis of seeing you performing. What you are saying here is that they have replaced those people with an algorithm basically and once you can demonstrate you have an audience online, and therefore you are a low-risk proposition because there is already a fan base for your music, then you will get signed at that point?
Tom Gray: The biggest thing for me about the whole industry has been the tip of risk. All the risk is now taken by the young performer. Everyone else further up the food chain has just reduced that risk down to almost nil. They just wait for the value to exist and then purchase it. That is what is really problematic for young aspiring artists: the amount of risk that they are having to take, which also explains why they come from wealthier backgrounds, because if you have a wealthy mum and dad obviously that is who is actually taking the risk.
Q313 Chair: This is the final question from me before bringing in other members. DJ Target, do you think it is difficult for people to break through? It sounds as if there is a level that you can get to where you can develop your own audience and music streaming helps with that, but how do you break through to being an act that is going to be played on commercial radio to the nation rather than through your own channels?
DJ Target: There is definitely a point that a lot of artists reach and then you see a very small percentage of those artists really going through and becoming the huge commercial stars. Some artists are happy within their world, having 20,000 followers online, being able to sell out 500-capacity venues year on year. Every time they release an album they are happy to go around and do that; they are happy to sell that same amount of merchandise—a lot of artists and a lot of independent artists, I might add, because in a major situation the labels would want more than that but in an independent situation everybody’s view of breaking through or making it is different.
You might see an act that has come from absolutely nothing and now can go and get a 1,000-capacity venue sold out. To them they have made it. There might be someone else whose expectations might be to reach the levels of a Stormzy or an Adele where you can do an arena. I would say it is not easy to break through that barrier from building a bit of a fan base and then really connecting with radio, with TV, with other outlets that are not necessarily so music-based. I think that really boils down to who the individual is and what they have got in the locker.
Coming from the scenes I come from, a lot of the young people now are looking up and seeing some of these artists that are making lots of money and doing really well, having success and it is looking like just another career option. Some people are not actually musicians, some of them look at it and think, “I can go to studio, I can rap or I can make a beat” and some of them are doing that and it is working. It is only when you get to the real serious stage where you are going to separate the long-term artist from the couple of quick hits is when you find out is this someone who has what it takes, like a Stormzy, or is it going to be someone who falls at the first major hurdle. I would not say it is easy at all; it is still tough.
Jane Beese: I was just going to pick up on that and say that we too, in the last 20 years, have started to live in what I fear is a fairly hateful scenario of the “X Factor” generation, where artists are being taken from zero to 100 and then the next year there is nothing there. When I first started working, I worked with a little-known band called Radiohead that had signed to EMI for five records, and it wasn’t until their third record, after lots of times up and down the motorway, hundreds of gigs, and all of that, that they produced a piece of work called OK Computer, which is in most people’s collections. I think that because of the deconstruction of the old traditional models, that whole system has broken down and I worry now about how we recreate that support system for young emerging artists.
One massive concern for me and my colleagues is this: if you are an emerging artist now and you have to monitor all your social media channels—you do not have a manager because there is no money so there is no 20% anywhere—how much time to do you actually spend being creative. For all the young artists I know, it is all about time management and juggling.
A quite well-known artist—I will not name them—who has had lots of success recently, told me a couple of years ago that she spends 5% of her time composing music. To me that was really horrific, because it is all about juggling everything else. What we are really seeing now, and not just among emerging artists, is a really massive spate of wellbeing and mental health issues. The number of young successful male artists who have killed themselves this year is now seven, eight, nine, 10—big actual names. The knock-on effect of not supporting this industry in the right way and not helping young people as they come through and supporting them is having quite tragic end results now, I think.
Chair: The next questions are from Paul Farrelly.
Q314 Paul Farrelly: Thank you, DC—as I am now going to call you. I want to come on to education, and not only overall concerns but to pick up on some points about disparities. By way of introduction, as an MP I have a foot in London and a foot back home in Staffordshire, and I can see the differences, not only resources and facilities in schools in London but also the difference in priorities of where music is on the agenda.
In Staffordshire, like many other areas, not only has the local authority been hit hard by funding cuts, but it has pursued academisation and contracting out with vigour. The peripatetic music service is run by Capita and we know how Capita run things and the tales of woe and the people leaving—it is heart breaking. It is just a cost really; it does not make us any money. We have a music hub, but the question is resources and what happens next. Then, of course, we had Michael Gove and his EBacc—one of many things he is to blame for. We have seen some damning statistics that make the situation worse than I thought it was in terms of the effects of that on incentives.
Naomi, to pick up on some of the points that you mentioned, what is your overarching concern about the way the Government are approaching music in the curriculum?
Naomi Pohl: As you have mentioned—you have picked up on quite a lot of key points there—the academies do not have to engage with the national curriculum so they do not have to offer music. Where I live I have only a choice of academy schools; there is no alternative. If you are going to an independent school, you are much more likely to have access to music because it is seen as something that does really benefit kids and the parents can afford to pay for it, so you are going to get a much better offering and obviously that is going to damage the talent pipeline later on down the road.
Our big issue is the postcode lottery, which is still patchy across the country. What access to music education you are likely to get depends where you live and that should not be the case. I know that Arts Council England has just published some quite positive statistics. One of our concerns is how much analysis of that has gone on, because I think they say themselves, “This report is only as good as the data that we have received from the hubs”, so there needs to be a bit more analysis and maybe a bit more transparency around what data has been provided and what it means. We have done a consumer survey talking to parents and the message we are getting is very much that it still depends on your household income whether you are going to be able to afford to buy an instrument and learn an instrument or not.
From the Musicians’ Union point of view, it is not just about featured artists—we have 30,000 members across the UK—but about having a sustainable career in music so that even if you are not going to make it as a featured artist you might be able to be a session musician, or you might be in a more supporting role. You might be able to get a job in an orchestra, or get a gig in the West End or on a touring show. But you have to have the skills to do that. You have to read sheet music.
I have had young students and people who are very enthusiastic about music, and who probably have talent, say, “I would love to be a session musician, but you have to be able to read music to do that.” If those alternative careers are not open to people then unless you get your one big hit and you manage to somehow struggle on for a bit, how are you going to pursue a career in professional music that lasts? It all comes down to music education again. It is trying to nurture that talent at an early age and make sure people have the skills they need.
I completely agree about the mental health issues, because we have lost quite a few members, and not just featured artists but people who have managed to make a career out of busking. There are people at all levels who are struggling with these issues. It all comes down to supporting them in the earliest possible stages.
Academies are certainly an issue and the EBacc has definitely been an issue. We would like there to be a review of the policy clash around music education looking at the EBacc, and also we would like the national plan for music education to be extended to early years education. We had a very good roundtable here recently—Tracey Brabin spoke about early years—and it would be good to make sure that from the earliest possible stage kids are interacting with music.
Q315 Paul Farrelly: In my area, there is only one school with a sixth form. Otherwise, everyone goes to the sixth-form college, which is brand new, rebuilt and very successful, and on the basis of success it has invested in a performing arts centre. But now, in terms of the treatment of college lecturers as opposed to schoolteachers, it is finding that there is a difference in treatment emerging. I understand from the brief that there is a disparity between funding pay rises for centrally employed teachers who might be on the peripatetic music service and to teachers in schools. Is that an issue for you in terms of staff and—
Naomi Pohl: Absolutely. We do a lot of work representing music teachers when they are threatened with redundancy or they have their contracts changed. Over the last decade most music teachers have been moved. They do not have employed status anymore. They have been moved on to self-employed contracts—zero-hours contracts—so they have absolutely no stability whatsoever and they are also now suffering with IR35 because they can be in a situation where a school or a music hub or a music service identifies them as being employed for tax and national insurance purposes, just because they are afraid that they might be caught out if they do not do that but they have no employment rights and they have zero-hours contracts so they are getting the worst of all worlds so unfortunately you lose music teachers as well. That was always the bread and butter way to make a living as a musician.
About 60% of our members teach as part of their careers, and that was always the solid work that you do during the day that would fund you to go out and gig or fund your next tour. Unfortunately there is no stability there either now. It is tricky if you are privately teaching. We set guideline rates for our music teachers, but the problem is that if you are expecting the parents to pay £32 an hour, a lot of kids are not going to get access to music education. There has to be infrastructure there. It has to be in schools and music hubs and there has to be some sort of subsidy to make the system work.
Q316 Paul Farrelly: Before I widen the questions, what is your take on how the hubs around the country are working? Is it patchy? Secondly, and importantly, because we are towards the end of 2018, what do the Government need to do now to make sure they have a plan in place for after 2020 when the current one expires?
Naomi Pohl: We have some recommendations for the next music plan that I can send to you. We are already engaging with MPs to lobby to make sure that the next national plan for music works. The plan was excellent in lots of ways, but it is just how it is implemented. I think academies have to be forced to engage with the national curriculum and we have to make sure that schools are forced to engage with music hubs as well because if you get a head teacher who is very passionate about music they will use the services of the local music hub, but unfortunately they can opt in and out. That is where you end up with a patchy system and I think it is very patchy. There are some excellent music hubs and there are some that we do not think are doing a good enough job or looking after their workforce.
We have to work together to try to have some consistency and make sure that all schools are forced—“forced” sounds a bit harsh—or encouraged, maybe through Ofsted, to engage with the arts and music so that those things do not slip off the agenda completely.
Q317 Paul Farrelly: Perhaps I can ask everyone this question. We have statistics on the reduction in numbers of people taking music or being offered music at GCSE and A-level. I know lots of people break into music. I was reading the Roger Daltrey book review about buying a dodgy homemade bass guitar and learning it and then just going to do their own thing. For a lot of people formal music education is important so I just wanted to ask everybody across the panel this: what do you think should be done to reverse the decline in people being offered and taking music at GCSE and A-level? DJ?
DJ Target: I think that is a tough one. A lot of what Naomi said is driving the lack of music in schools, music having to be part of the curriculum. When I was growing up, every school did music. It was almost like we looked at that lesson as a sanctuary, even if you were not trying to be a musician—back then, I wanted to be a footballer or an athlete. It was more just we were all into music and it was a lesson that felt different from other lessons. It gave you different skills that other lessons did not and I think that is more important now than ever before. We have even more young people who are now interested in getting into music, to play instruments, to be DJs, to be artists, to be songwriters, whatever it may be. I think it is more important than ever that that option is being shown to kids coming up from a very young age.
Q318 Paul Farrelly: Tom, you mentioned that in your experience now it is becoming more and more the preserve of private schools.
Tom Gray: Yes. It is purely anecdotal but, yes, most of the kids who are now coming into music are upper middle-class kids, certainly the white kids. There seems to be real divide there. They have the support. They have the parental backing. They have access to instrumentation and, very importantly now, computers. That is the key to it, because all of music is being made on computers now. You could buy a cheap tape machine for £100, whereas getting an Apple Mac is going to set you back a grand or two.
A broader overview of all of this stuff is that it feels to me like what is hard when we are talking about all of this stuff is that there is just so little evaluation of what is available across the country and regionally. It would be the end of the world obviously, if we took the very little money that is being invested in music and the arts and put it into evaluating music and the arts, so there would be even less money for music and the arts. What is hard when you are talking about this stuff is that nobody knows. Nobody knows if one music hub is completely failing and another one is doing a good job. No one knows what schools are giving music and what schools are not giving music. No one knows and I think it is brutal and kind of pathetic.
Q319 Paul Farrelly: Something for the Department. Jane, this is my last question on this, in relation to the same question, before we move on. In your evidence you say that you are often filling in gaps in the provision.
Jane Beese: I think it is interesting for us because I was just thinking about it while we are having this discussion. Torquil and the gang who rebuilt the Roundhouse obviously had quite a, sadly, prophetic vision about what would be needed in the future, and as we have seen by the numbers increase it is more and more needed. One of our very local schools told us last year that they were providing no music provision at the moment because the budgets have been cut so much.
In an ideal world we would not exist. We do not see ourselves as an educational facility. We are not giving out diplomas or anything at the end of a project. We see ourselves as wanting to create a safe space where young people can discover their creativity and simply their confidence as well. In a very simplistic way my feeling is that we should just make music compulsory in schools.
There is a much more complex issue underneath that, which is about what music is being taught and how is it being taught, because traditionally a lot of music in schools was largely classical, not referencing what young people are particularly into. Again, as we have touched on here, we all have anecdotal remembrance of a good teacher or a teacher that we did not engage with changing our life for good or bad. I think there is a whole complexity about how music is taught and how it is that place that you said you go into where it is like, “Yay, we are going to music now.” I felt the same way about art lessons; it felt like a real creative escape.
Every young person has to be taught in a different way and their strengths and weaknesses recognised, not just set against exams and testing, which we know does not benefit all young people. I think there is a complexity to it, but we need to reverse the scenario that is decimating the amount of culture that is in the curriculum.
Tom Gray: There are two things, aren’t there, because when we are talking about the music pipeline it is very hard to say whether music education is directly related to that because so many musicians do not come from formal music background but we do know that music education leads to better academic results. We do know that it leads to better mental health. We know that it teaches people better motor skills and it teaches them memory skills. The defunding of art in schools, not putting art on, is nearly as important because most of the musicians I know went to art school.
Jane Beese: That is not a new thing. That is historic.
Tom Gray: That is historic. That is John Lennon. That is Roxy Music. That is Ray Davies. That is everyone.
Q320 Rebecca Pow: Thank you very much. It is interesting to hear what you are saying, especially with children who have been in both systems, state school and private, and looking at the music. I would take issue on quite a lot of those comments. I do not think it is all just about money, because would you not say there is quite a lot of music that is relatively free? Choir is not an expensive thing for a school to do, is it? Should we be thinking more about what schools can do that is not hooked up on what costs so much? I taught myself the guitar. I bought it at a village fete for 25 pence. My point is, do we need to get hooked up on the fact that it is all about money?
Tom Gray: I think if you are talking about the talent pipeline, then of course it is about money. If we are talking about whether a kid can go and bang two sticks together then, yes, of course they can do that. Whether they will get anywhere, whether they will have a career banging sticks together is—
Q321 Rebecca Pow: I wanted to go back to the national plan for music. You have touched on lots of things. Apparently there is not much in the plan that focuses on the other side of music, so all the technical side, the technicians, all the sound people, so do you think—perhaps Jane—there is more scope there to, first, get something into the plan and, secondly, help in some way to create a pipeline or a channel for all of those much wider areas of music?
Jane Beese: Yes. I think certain sectors of the industry are looking at it more widely; I know we certainly are. A lot of the projects that we run with young people we are now starting to focus on it, the end result being not simply that you are on stage behind the microphone. Just picking up on the money thing. To run the Roundhouse choir, which is about 40 young people a year, we have an alumni of probably 300 or 400 vocalists. That costs in the region of £20,000 a year to run because you need—
Q322 Rebecca Pow: Who goes to it? Who takes part in it?
Jane Beese: It is 18 to 25-year-olds. It is an open-access course. You audition for it. Unlike a lot of the projects that we run, you do audition to be part of the choir. They have had incredible professional output at the end of it, playing in all sorts of places. What we do not do—because £20,000 will not do this—is tour with them. They do not have national, regional or international opportunities because it would simply be too expensive.
The core costs of that are having professional and excellent tutors who run the project. Even to be a vocalist—that is your free instrument that you own—what we run in the studios is the technical store, and part of our mixed economy funding that we run at the Roundhouse is that we do not charge anybody for hiring equipment. Therefore, the ethos is that you do not have to have your 25 pence guitar or your expensive guitar to come down and play with your colleagues, and you do not need a lot of money to be in a band.
Referencing what Damian was saying earlier, I think Noel Gallagher’s other point was that he would never have been able to form a band had he not been on the dole because that gave him the time and the—he was also working at the time. I should not have said that.
Q323 Rebecca Pow: We will not go into that. You can claim benefits and work and it should go up and down with your work. That is how universal credit is supposed to work, so maybe people will have to think about that but that is not a road that one would want to go down.
On the technician side, are there lots of jobs out there and is it a market that we could help in some way to make recommendations that we could expand?
DJ Target: There are tons of jobs. I was going to mention as well that I think music in schools does not just need to be about learning an instrument, because in 2018 there are probably 50 times the number of jobs than there were in the 1980s or 1990s, just because of the world and the climate we live in. You could be a videographer who makes music videos. You could be somebody who is a technician or a sound engineer. There are probably hundreds of jobs that fall within the music industry and I think we should be opening kids’ brains up to that at an early age—opening up their creativity, like you said, and encouraging them to access their confidence. I do not think it is just about necessarily money or making sure everybody has access to learn the harp or whatever. I think it is just as important to open up their brains to the ideas and possibilities, and there are so many.
Q324 Rebecca Pow: My experience is obviously quite different from Paul’s, because in my area we have set up a south-west hub there. We have a sixth-form college that has just set up lots of recording facilities. The private schools have stuff too. I know a number of students from other schools who have done music tech and have not been able to take the next step to use it in any way and they have just ended up doing other jobs and gone out of that industry.
Tom Gray: This comes down to venues—it really does—and it is the most upsetting thing. You can travel across northern Europe and play gigs in northern France, Belgium, Holland and across Scandinavia and Germany and there is a small gig in that small town, which is evidently Government funded and beautifully built, for multi-purpose use. It pays flat fees to the people and usually has accommodation as well so the kids can stay there. They feed you. Then you come home and you play these clubs that are filthy, falling apart and have terrible sound systems. If you are a girl you are in trouble because there is no toilet with a door. You could not learn to be a good sound technician in that venue anyway.
We have a problem when bigger venues get built. A lot of the time people are very interested in concert venues for classical music. We have a problem in this country of high art and low art. Our class system seems to ride roughshod through our whole art sector.
Q325 Rebecca Pow: Would there be any merit in the classical side meeting much more with the other sectors of music to do joint projects?
Tom Gray: There is so little joined-up thinking throughout the entire system.
Q326 Rebecca Pow: In my area I noticed there are all these different music fraternities and bodies but they do not link up very often. Would that be beneficial to the overall picture?
Naomi Pohl: Yes. Orchestras are beginning to do a lot more outreach work in local schools, which is fantastic because it means that everyone is getting the value of the public funding that goes to orchestras, not just people who want to see classical concerts. It happens but again it is down to the individual organisations. There is no overview of that. We do not have the broad picture. It is just down to organisations to try to form those partnerships locally.
Q327 Rebecca Pow: What about sharing venues as well? I know some of them do use a lot of good news programmes, like my Blue House, but could there be more mileage there to help with the venue side of it?
Tom Gray: There are all kinds of questions. These privately run small venues are only open for four hours a day. What are they doing the rest of the time? Are they physically able to be used as anything else? Are they nice enough to bring kids in to teach inside them in many ways?
The obvious thing is that we should have multi-purpose venues where people can be educated, where we can hear a classical recital or a gig. That is clear and there is no question that that is missing across the board. Most of our arts funding goes to the opera. It does not go to building these kinds of venues across the country. Why we do not have it is just a massive question mark for me. There are so many things you could do with that kind of venue. You could train. You could have shows. You could create an infrastructure for young artists to be able to perform because there is very little opportunity for people to travel regionally and play. There are great organisations, such as Off Axis, that allow a band to go and play in another town and move around but the kind of real touring circuit that this country needs does not exist.
Q328 Rebecca Pow: I still believe that this country is revered worldwide for our music. Do you believe that we are missing a trick in terms of the framework that we have beneath it now and the amount of credence we give to what it could generate for the economy?
Jane Beese: Absolutely.
DJ Target: One hundred per cent, and now more than ever before. I have come up through the underground music route—the club route, so less of the live music gigs, touring route. I was lucky enough to come up through jungle music, UK garage, which was part of the early formation that formed grime. Just those three genres alone are three of the biggest exports—not even just music—the country has ever come up with. We have so much talent across the board now that is crossing boundaries internationally and now we have these self-sufficient artists who are going off and building their fan bases across the world as well now, and we should be screaming that at the top of our voices. We lead when it comes to music bar any country talent-wise and creativity-wise. Whether that is the US, whether it is Europe, Latin America; I think the UK cannot be challenged.
Q329 Rebecca Pow: Should we be making more of a case to the Chancellor? Should we be getting mercenary about it and putting figures on it, as well as all the mental health issues and the other spin-offs we are going to get. Should we be doing that?
Jane Beese: Absolutely. There are good figures around from UK music and all the rest of it about how much it adds to the economy. Those figures are all there.
Naomi Pohl: Music tourism generates about £4.5 billion for the economy, so it is a no brainer to support it.
Jane Beese: We should be shouting about these new amazing genres. For me, discovering the grime thing was like discovering a punk movement. It has the same energy. It is the first unique thing that we have come up with for quite a long time. But again, as you said, the 696 form has gone but the trouble has not gone. That scene is not being supported by local councils, by licensees. There is still an amount of what I believe to be institutionalised racism, which is hindering that scene rather than allowing it to flourish. We are absolutely missing a trick by trying to put something back in a box rather than trying to create something that is going to be financially and culturally valuable for us as a country.
Q330 Simon Hart: Sticking to the education theme, unsurprisingly, I think it was you, Naomi, who said earlier that there were some teachers in some schools who were inspirational and managed to somehow get around the financial obstacles. There was one in my area who created a world-class orchestra in a little seaside town called Tenby, despite all of this. He managed to overcome it. I am wondering what magic potion he and others used that we should be spreading wider. The financial obstacles are always going to be there but some people clearly can do it. How do we tap into that?
Naomi Pohl: He is clearly a very passionate person, so unfortunately that is where we end up with the postcode lotteries; you get schools where you have someone who is that passionate about it and they will make it a priority. It should be a priority in every school. It is not that difficult to do if you have someone who is passionate because there are musicians in a local area who can come in and teach and it is just a matter of putting aside some budget to pay them to do that. I think you summarised exactly what the issue is.
Q331 Simon Hart: There must be other people we can make, encourage or incentivise to be as passionate, who might not even know it yet.
Naomi Pohl: Absolutely, but there need to be jobs for those people because at the moment they are being forced into situations where they do not have a job to go to so they are trying to do it all privately outside of the school systems, outside of the hub system.
Jane Beese: There needs to be a framework to support those people, because it should not be the responsibility of a handful of passionate individuals. Those passionate individuals will always ultimately burn out, because if they are not working within a system that supports the work they are doing, there is only so much energy that they can put into it.
Q332 Simon Hart: This bloke retired and went to work for the council. There you go.
There was another thing that I was picking up on top of your comments about demonstrable benefits to kids from engaging in music, and that is an area we have covered in terms of sport as well, and you are absolutely right that there appear to be lots of examples. Lots of people will come and sit where you are and make that point. I think the thing that would be helpful for most of us to know is where we can go to for the evidence that demonstrates that. If we have to go and tackle the Chancellor or tackle the education sector or whoever it might be, we need that evidence in a pretty irrefutable form, and I wondered where we can get it.
Tom Gray: The MU certainly has a lot of that data. UK Music—
Q333 Simon Hart: If you have already sent it I apologise but it just came up.
Tom Gray: If you want us to aggregate all of the information on all the different studies that have gone into it—
Q334 Simon Hart: I do not want to create a massive project here but we all know it is right. We all know you—
Tom Gray: It is tidal wave of information that you are asking for.
Q335 Simon Hart: Yes, I accept that. I think all of us have anecdotal evidence and there are so many examples either in our own families or areas that reinforce what you are saying. It is just trying to get that into a form that convinces the bean counters and the cynical civil service that this is something that is ultimately a cost saving measure rather than a cost generating measure.
Tom Gray: Yes, absolutely. I do not think that is a problem.
Q336 Simon Hart: The only other thing—I do not think we have talked about it today—is whether the national lottery enters your world as a potential source of funding. Is it as attuned to your objectives as it should be?
Naomi Pohl: I think the lottery has been great but it is in decline, isn’t it? It has been brilliant at supporting cultural projects and it has topped up the Arts Council pot, but the problem is that there are just too many lotteries available now. I think the national lottery income is going down so it is something that is another concern—if we lose that, what are we going to replace it with?
Tom Gray: The opera employs a lot of incredible musicians and technicians, but we are in a situation where I think for every £8 that goes to the opera, £1 goes to pop, and if that was in any way reflecting consumerism, or reflecting democracy or population—
Q337 Simon Hart: Somebody once said, “More permanent secretaries go to the opera than go to the Roundhouse.” That is a reasonable accusation I think.
Tom Gray: I think that is probably true. I do not want one penny to be taken away from the opera, but that ratio should be exactly in reverse.
Jane Beese: You also then get into a question about the audiences going to that work as well. I would stick my neck out and say I speak for everybody on this panel when I say that arts and music should be for everyone, not just the privileged few. I think there are quite a lot of politicians coming to see the Pixies at the Roundhouse this week. There are a few in this evening.
Q338 Clive Efford: Just following on from that. You have made the point about the lottery. Why do you think it is that the lottery does not support pop music as much as it does high art?
Tom Gray: There is a cultural hangover from when music did used to make a lot of money for people. People still think that musicians are wealthy and that we probably have an easy life. I think most of us who are jobbing do not make much more money than a teacher, if we are lucky, and that is if you have managed to build a sustainable career.
People still think that it will look after itself. It will take care of itself. Musicians are fine. Seemingly, lots of decisions when applied to the music industry would be unimaginable if applied to any other industry in terms of oversight. It seems to be a wild west situation in terms of oversight and evaluating the way that we structure everything. There are all kinds of competition issues and conflicts of interest within my industry that I feel would have been intervened upon many years before had it been any other kind of industry. Why doesn’t the national lottery give money to us? I think it is just cultural.
Naomi Pohl: It is seen as a commercial proposition, isn’t it? We still think of the recorded music industry being something that is self-sustaining and that rock and pop and other genres like that, which are popular, generate their own income, but we know that the majority of our members make around £20,000 a year from music, so they are definitely not high earners. When UK Music releases the stats every year about how much money is generated for the economy, I think sometimes there is a bit of a misunderstanding. They think that that means that because the industry is doing well overall money is going into musicians’ pockets, but that is not the case.
Q339 Clive Efford: It is a very successful industry and a wealthy one. You have talked about how much it generates for the economy. Does enough recycle from the top back down to reinvest at the bottom, and is there a mechanism for that?
Tom Gray: No. It is a flat no and there is no mechanism for that.
Naomi Pohl: The copyright directive would be helpful. It is about the money filtering through from Google down to the performer and not getting stuck either at the top of the chain or when it hits labels and publishers and they only pay out a tiny percentage to the artists on their books.
Q340 Clive Efford: How would we sort that out so that we could get more return for the people who are working hard at the bottom but also create a fund where you could set up the sorts of venues that Tom talked about? What do you envisage as a solution to that problem?
Naomi Pohl: If the copyright directive makes it through at EU level and then we adopt that in the UK, that would be a very good first step, so we are hoping that that is going to happen. Beyond that it is about where at UK level we do need to have those conversations with Google about doing fair licence agreements. Also, we need to talk to the labels and the publishers about making sure that the money filters down and that they do renegotiate contracts for artists who signed pre-digital and who are getting royalties that are still the same as they would have received on physical copies being sold.
Tom Gray: We have massive competition problems within the British music industry. Sony have just been given permission for another massive takeover. The problem is that the biggest players in the music industry create all the value. You would not say that they are cartel—they are not a cartel—but they do set all the rates because no one can argue with them. They are too big to challenge. The major labels were allowed to buy the publishers so they have taken out their own competition on that negotiating table, so if you are songwriter your chances of getting more money as a songwriter for your deal is not there because the people who should be negotiating for you are already owned by the record company, the people who you should be negotiating against. This has been allowed to happen. They have grown and grown and it has just been about aggregating value within the market for these big companies. They are not interested in investing in the small stuff. That is just not their game.
Jane Beese: I think some of this has come up as far as the Competition Commission level, but we have not discussed in any detail what you are saying, which is that there is corporatisation not just in the labels but in the promoters and the festivals. There are several large companies that are not only buying up venue stock and festival stock, thereby increasing the leverage they have, but subsuming a lot of the smaller promoters under their wider corporate umbrella. We more frequently now see that a little promoter who has worked with a band since they were playing in front of 60 people is holding a date at the Roundhouse, which holds 3,000, and one of the big companies will suddenly phone us up and say, “We are promoting that artist now,” because they have attached a festival offer to it as well.
I do not know what we can do about that apart from becoming more aware of when this becomes a conflict of interest, when one player in the market is so powerful that they are literally dictating it. My understanding of how those companies work is not that they are looking for a long-term investment for the artist; they are looking for what their shareholders will see at the end of a year. It is just a 12-month thing. It is just about how much you are owning and what those figures look like, rather than caring about the industry that you are buying so much of.
Q341 Clive Efford: I have one last question. Tom, you mentioned about touring around Europe and coming to venues that were obviously state sponsored and had accommodation attached to them and all the rest of it. Is there a system that you would point to in any one country that you would say, “That is what we should be aspiring to”?
Tom Gray: I don’t know.
Jane Beese: France. I think there is something that is a ticket tax where there is an amount of money from each ticket—I am sorry, but I am not a real expert on this—that gets put into a central fund that then subsidises creative spaces and venues. There is definitely a lot more—
Naomi Pohl: Like a cultural levy.
Q342 Clive Efford: So you do not pay a levy?
Tom Gray: Absolutely.
Q343 Julian Knight: It has been an absolutely fascinating session. Thank you very much for your contributions. We did have a very interesting session a few weeks ago. We had ShaoDow here—is that the pronunciation?
DJ Target: It took me a while to get my head around this, because he is like a shadow, but he is a Shaolin, isn’t he?
Q344 Julian Knight: I am not going to repeat his name but that particular gentleman told us that venues are reluctant to book grime artists because of perceptions. I think you touched on it earlier as well, Jane. Is that your experience and what should we do about it?
DJ Target: That has been my experience personally and I know, speaking for a lot of the grime scene, that they have experienced that coming up over the last 15 years. It does not seem to have become any easier as well. It is like the scene, the genre, the artists within it, the fans of it—we have proved that this has just as much right as any another sort of gig, as a football match. The 696 form for so long was that huge hurdle and barrier that was unfairly put in place to target these events in particular.
Q345 Julian Knight: That has now ended, hasn’t it?
DJ Target: Yes, the form has now ended, but the issues are still there. The police may still cancel a venue if they receive relevant information, which can be anything sometimes. There is still a bunch of artists who have not been able to turn their lives around. Some of these artists have not even been criminals before. It is just that they have taken a different path in life but a lot of these artists who have come from a very different background who are now legitimate musicians, creative people who are providing entertainment for thousands upon thousands of people who are doing gigs, who are doing everything by the book, they are still being told, “You cannot perform” and they are not even given reasons for it.
Q346 Julian Knight: They are being told they cannot perform by local authorities?
DJ Target: It could be a venue that has been pressured to cancel the event by the police. It could be a local authority that pulls a licence or threatens to pull a licence if you have that event. It is coming from different levels. The small promoter cannot afford to have his licence taken away. The small venue that already is struggling cannot afford to risk it so then they end up saying, “Okay. We do not do those types of nights anymore” and that has happened in lots of locations around the country.
Q347 Julian Knight: Of course, there has to be oversight by a council authority of matters relating to venues, public safety and so on, but what do you think should be the format? How should they approach this?
Jane Beese: I think what we learnt, certainly from when the tail end of the 696 thing was happening, was that how it was being used in all the boroughs in London could be quite often very different, so that in itself was a bit of a challenge. It technically does not exist anymore. I was talking to a promoter’s rep yesterday who was at O2 Academy Islington last week and they had cancelled a show on the advice of the police. It does not matter whether the form is there or not; they are still doing it because they have been told that one particular artist is going to be involved. They are not usually given the reason why. It might not be anything to do with a criminal record. It can purely be around association but that is all a little bit opaque.
The venue is always going to work with the local council. They are responsible for our licence so we are always going to have to listen to them to a certain extent. What we would like is for them and the police to be coming to us and saying, “How can we help you support this work so that it happens safely and what do we need to do so that it happens safely?”
Q348 Julian Knight: Sorry to cut across you, but is that what you feel is effectively what happens; that instructions come down from on high through a telephone call quite late in the day, which basically leaves everyone out to dry? What you need is an ongoing conversation, which is happening to a limited degree but not to the degree that you would like to see it happen. Is that a fair estimate of where you are with this?
DJ Target: Yes, I think so. The fact that the form has been taken away is a step but the issues are still there, as we are all saying, and it is unfairly done as well. You do not get an indie gig shut down the night before because one of the band member’s friend’s cousins is rumoured to be attending and that is a no go. That does not happen. You do not get a call into Manchester United football ground saying, “Leeds supporters are on their way, so it has to go off”. That does not happen. Why does it happen at these events where if you check the stats there is very few incident.
I have been involved in it since the very beginning. As time has progressed, I have seen it go from some incidents—I am not going to sit here and say there have been no incidents—but not more or less incidents than there have been at any other type of event. I have not seen or heard of an incident at a grime event or a club show in a very long time.
Tom Gray: We are a white indie band and we play at Glasgow Barrowlands, where we held the record for the most number of people thrown out—45 people got thrown out of our show. There is no reason for this prejudice. People get drunk and do silly things at every type of performance.
Jane Beese: You mentioned Wireless earlier, Target. Wireless has been issued its licence for Finsbury Park next year but with an earlier curfew, which I would have thought meant that the audience is out on the streets earlier causing trouble rather than being in Finsbury Park. The artists are being told not to swear from the stage and not to wear offensive clothing. That creates an atmosphere where the artists are going to question those things. That is not a supportive gesture, is it?
Q349 Julian Knight: And it is very clear that you think it is about race.
Jane Beese: Absolutely.
DJ Target: It stems from ignorance and misunderstanding but, if you boil it down, I think it is still institutionalised racism in a lot of these cases
Julian Knight: Back in the day—I am going to really embarrass myself yet again now—I went to a few Pogues concerts. I have to say, I can barely imagine anything more drunken or intimidating or dangerous than a Pogues concert at the Royal Court at Liverpool.
Naomi, what concerns do your members have about access to rehearsal and recording facilities?
Naomi Pohl: Yes, that is another concern. Again, it is about facilities in local communities. UK Music has a network of rehearsal spaces, which is brilliant, but I think they were originally funded by DCMS. There was some kind of seed money there and then, because of funding cuts, it was no longer available. Again, it is a matter of good people in communities continuing to run viable businesses and they face the same problems around business rates that music venues face.
Again, I am afraid it does kind of come down to money. You want to make sure that people can access them at a reasonable rate as well. If they are just operating as purely commercial businesses, they are going to have to charge high rates and that is going to price people out of being able to access them. Yes, I think the UK Music model is a good one. It has rehearsal spaces across the country that it is liaising with and supporting in whatever way it can, but there is definitely room for more of that kind of work.
Q350 Julian Knight: Are there regional differences in those facilities? Are there quite sharp regional differences in terms of the recording facilities?
Naomi Pohl: Yes, absolutely. Again, if you are in a major city or if you are in London, then you probably have a lot more access to studios and spaces than you have if you are outside London. Again, it comes down to the music venues. I think it would be brilliant if they had their doors open and they were offering rehearsal space during the day, but when we talk to the Music Venue Trust about these kinds of issues, they always say, “All these venues are run by one man and a dog and they have no money to do it.” Trying to set up these additional services is extremely difficult for them.
Just to touch upon something that was said earlier about women working in these spaces, we have been doing a lot of work around sexual harassment in the music industry since the #MeToo movement began. One of the key issues is the working environment for female musicians. I have spoken to so many young musicians who have said, “I no longer perform because I do not feel like it is a safe environment.” There is not enough money to get a cab home afterwards, it is late-night working and quite often you do not have suitable toilet and changing facilities.
Again, if you talk to Music Venue Trust about that, they quite reasonably say, “What do you expect the venues to do about it? They are running on a shoestring. They cannot really afford to put in lovely changing facilities for female performers.” But it is not going to help gender diversity in the music industry if it is just not somewhere that women can frequent. I know the same goes for other female performers, such as stand-up comics. It is another very male-dominated industry.
Tom Gray: I speak to a lot of young female artists and it is the same. The repetition with which you hear the same stories about fear, from where they park their car to move their equipment after playing one of these gigs, to very little security, no changing room, even down to the riders. Classically they just leave three bottles of lager for the lads in the band and you are like, “Oh, thank you.” It is not geared for anything other than middle-aged white men, really.
Q351 Julian Knight: When it comes to oversight, we talked before about local authorities and how they can effectively have this interaction with you, and it is almost those areas they should be looking at and perhaps be more focused on, rather than areas such as those emphasised by the 696 form, for example. It is more these sorts of safety issues for female performers, so do you think that is something that perhaps local authorities should be—
DJ Target: I would not say “more”; I would say that all of these are equally important. I would not say less focus on sorting out the female stuff and forget about the institutionalised racism—that sounds wild to me. I would say we need to focus on all of these things equally, and if there are ways that we can address them all and improve them all, I think that is the direction we should really be taking.
Naomi Pohl: Yes, and it is about working with music venues, because I think they clearly need to be educated. They need to be given the arguments to make when they get that phone call, to say, “No, sorry, the statistics are these. This is how we are going to manage it. This is the security that we have in place.” They need to be equipped to have those conversations and a lot of them are not because it is literally a couple of people running a pub.
Jane Beese: I think that is why Music Venue Trust is very important, because it is about having that collective conversation, so when you are dealing with an authority, a promoter or an agent—we get this quite frequently at the Roundhouse—“You are the only venue that does that” because you are sitting in your own little bubble doing your work in your space. It is about having those collective conversations and being able to come together and share what those issues are that is really important.
Q352 Julian Knight: Jane, I have a couple of final questions that are specific to your venue. In terms of Arts Council England funding, first of all, how does it help you operate as a commercial venue? Secondly, what is required for you as a national portfolio organisation? Is it viable, do you think, for smaller venues potentially to take on that mantle?
Jane Beese: Just working backwards there, I think the smaller venues are going to have to learn to be more entrepreneurial about how they proceed.
In terms of the Roundhouse, our Arts Council funding is about 8% of our income. We work in a very mixed economy, so our development team have a budget target of about £3.5 million a year. That comes from a number of different sources, from trusts and foundations through to corporate sponsorship and private individuals. Commercially, we make a lot of money through hiring out the space, whether that be for rock and roll shows or for even the occasional bar mitzvah and wedding. It is a very mixed economy, and it is always challenging.
I think most venues of our size employ a core staff of around 10 people. We employ 120 people, in part because of the breadth of the programming we do, but it is largely to do with our work with 11 to 25-year-olds, working with 6,000, with the aim of growing that to 10,000 in the next four years. It continues to be a challenge economically, but bearing in mind that we are only 12 or 13 years old in this guise, we continue to be quite an ambitious organisation. That philosophy around helping the next generation is very much at the heart of that ambition.
There are some UK funders, such as Help Musicians UK and the PRS Foundation, that are doing good work in terms of developing projects in the regions and also developing emerging talent networks. There are a lot of really great projects coming through all across the country, but it is pretty much done on passion and a shoestring.
Q353 Julian Knight: Just one final point here. Some 8% of your income is from the Arts Council. We visited some venues in Manchester, and we went to a theatre project and a far higher portion of their income was funded in that way. That is presumably because you are London-based, you have better opportunities, potentially better commercial opportunities maybe than other parts of the country. Would you say that? What lessons can these smaller venues—you mentioned them being entrepreneurial—learn from you?
Jane Beese: Hopefully some of those smaller organisations do learn from us be being part of a network with us. I think we are very flattered when we see imitation in what people are doing, based on what we have done. For us to build the facility of the Roundhouse studios and continue to invest money in it, and for it not to be an afterthought because it comes under education somehow, is absolutely crucial to what we do.
It is interesting, because something was said earlier about being in London making it easier. There are two sides to that. I do not think it necessarily does make it easier. London is a very saturated market. One of the big promoters told me that in London this summer there were 42 events that had over 30,000 capacity, as opposed to around 30 the previous year, so that means there is a lot of competition to decide which tickets the customer is going to buy. I think it can be a double-edged sword.
Another thing we did not touch on earlier was the regional stuff. We are already starting to see this very much at first hand: a talent drain moving away from London because it is simply unaffordable to be here on wages of under £25,000 a year. I have already seen people from my team leave and take jobs in Manchester. The figure that we do not know at the moment is how many young people are choosing not to come to London at all in the first place. Again, I think this is a bit of a double-edged sword. It is going to be good for the regions, it is going to be great for Manchester and Bristol and Sheffield for those young creatives to be staying rather than congregating here, but there are two sides to that. I do not think being in London necessarily makes it more simple commercially.
Julian Knight: That it is a guaranteed success, yes.
Jane Beese: Especially at this period of the year. There are hundreds of gigs on every night in London, so why are you going to come to us?
Chair: We have a final set of questions from Jo Stevens. DJ Target, I know you gave us notice in advance that you need to leave at about 12 o’clock.
DJ Target: I can stay until a quarter past.
Chair: That is great, thank you.
Q354 Jo Stevens: I will not be offended if you disappear mid-question. It strikes me that we are at a really critical point for music. Listening to what you have all said this morning, it is like we are strangling musicians at birth because of the cuts to music education. The music industry has become another strand of the gig economy, with precarious employment. Then for those musicians who do succeed and who are able to tour, and this massive £4.5 billion push to our economy every year from the music industry, we have Brexit looming, so what is going to happen then? I am interested to hear from you about the practical concerns for musicians, about what leaving the EU next March is going to mean.
Jane Beese: I thought we had got away without mentioning the “B” word, but I think what people are talking about is visas and what that is going to mean, and not only for UK musicians travelling abroad; for every single European state that you go into, are you going to have to have some sort of permit? That will just literally make touring Europe impossible because it is done in a precarious financial way already. It is also about what musicians are coming into the UK. This has already been reported. There is a festival up in Glasgow called Celtic Connections, which has a very wide international reach in terms of artists. Donald Shaw, who runs that, said last year—this was more to do with exchange rates post the Brexit vote—that his festival was going to be 25% down on international artists just due to the fees increasing because of the exchange rate. It is already happening; the effects of it are already happening. I think the main concern is around movement in and out.
Tom Gray: If you tour in the States or you have ever had the joy of crossing a Swiss border when you are performing, preparing a carnet is long and expensive and you have to detail every single little thing that you are carrying with you in a massive folder. If you have to do that for every single country, paying somebody to prepare that for you is going to be an enormous financial drain.
People think that because back in the 1960s people used to tour in Europe it was fine, but here is the thing: there used to be a massive national touring circuit in the UK. You could do 60 to 70 shows regionally and build up and grow and get big enough that you had enough money to be able to go to Europe. You had already made it, effectively, when you left the country. But that has disappeared now. People have made Europe part of their low-level touring system, so if you are a young band, you will do five gigs around the country and then you will go to Benelux and Germany, but that is going to go. You are going to scythe off half their income.
For me, it extends far beyond touring problems. There are problems with media companies staying in London. I am also a media composer. The effect of just those organisations not using British talent to score their shows and their TV and stuff is pretty frightening as well.
Q355 Jo Stevens: What are your members telling you, Naomi?
Naomi Pohl: The big concern is the end of freedom of movement. We have been lobbying very much for a single entry visa for the EU so that you can apply once, maybe apply annually or every couple of years and then you can tour around the EU member states without having to apply at every single border. We had a really useful meeting with Margot James, where she was very supportive of that idea. I know that there are plenty of people in the creative industries who are lobbying for something similar, so it makes sense for it to be something that is open to workers in the creative industries in general. We want it to be reciprocal, because we want to make sure that we can still have artists from the EU, that they still include us on their tour and they are not incentivised to just stay within the EU and not come to the UK, because there is a really important cultural exchange going on there.
It is a problem also for our members who are freelance, who are not featured artists, but might get a call to do a gig or go and work with an orchestra at short notice in the EU. At the moment, that is quite a significant chain of income coming into the UK. That is an important part of our members’ careers that they might lose, because they are not going to be able to take up those short-term, one-off opportunities.
Q356 Jo Stevens: Presumably you must all be planning now six, 12, 18 months ahead in terms of tours. Can you do that with the uncertainty at the moment? Tom.
Tom Gray: Not really, no. Everyone is terrified. Nobody who is a musician is not talking about it and people are fearful and deeply uncertain about what is going to happen next.
DJ Target: Also, less from an individual musician standpoint but more as a country, as I was saying before, celebrating these genres that we have created and have exported around the world, which have brought in so much awareness and much success to a bunch of different artists, us not being able to fund all that creativity in these musical genres and all this talent out through Europe and out to the wider world will not just hit the musicians; it will hit us as a country that is full of talented, creative people. I think there will be problems across the board.
Q357 Jo Stevens: I am really pleased to hear that you are getting a positive reception about the EU-wide touring visa, but one of the things that we covered in our report on the potential impact of Brexit, which we published about six or seven months ago, was the salary level for visas. I think you mentioned earlier that your members, on average, earn about £20,000 a year, so what would be the impact on the music industry if there is an extension to salary levels or a new figure?
Naomi Pohl: For the tier 2 visa it is £30,000, isn’t it?
Jo Stevens: Yes.
Naomi Pohl: Yes, the majority of our members earn less than that. Even if you are employed full time in an orchestra, you might be on less than £30,000 a year. They are the most stable jobs that musicians are likely to have and they are funded organisations. Yes, it is going to be much harder for the individual artists who are under that threshold. Also, we are a bit worried about the words “high-skilled workers” because how do you demonstrate that if you are not classically trained? Where do they draw the line in terms of skills?
Tom Gray: The significant thing is that it is a Catch-22. If you cut off half of somebody’s income and they are already below and they are getting half their income from Europe, how is that going to work? You are staring down a tunnel; it is very dark. I do not see any way out of it, to be honest with you.
Jo Stevens: Apart from remaining in the EU.
Tom Gray: Apart from remaining, yes.
Q358 Paul Farrelly: Just quickly, I declared something for customs for the first time and there were two people—I was coming from outside the EU—and it took half an hour of haggling. My question is: what about musicians?
Tom Gray: You should try to get a guitar on an aeroplane.
Paul Farrelly: The queues from the EU, if you buy an instrument—
Tom Gray: Yes, it is impossible. We shift tonnes of gear. This is the important thing. If you are doing a production show, you are talking many tonnes of gear. Usually, if it is a decent-sized production show, it is a couple of articulated lorries full of stuff that would have to be itemised and then checked at every border crossing. You are talking about hours and hours lost from a touring schedule. You are talking about having to add in extra travel days, which means you are already eating so far into the amount of money that you can make. Just by adding extra travel days, you are paying maybe the 20 people who you are touring with, the team, and they are getting paid to do nothing for the day while they watch your stuff come off the back of a truck. The profit margins are going to disappear, there is no question about it.
Paul Farrelly: I asked the two customs officers at the terminal—just two in the whole of Heathrow—what they were going to do when we left the European Union, and they said they were planning to take the week off.
Chair: It is good to hear that the contingency planning is going well. I think we will have to draw to a close there. Thank you all very much. It has been an absolutely fascinating session this morning and I think we got a lot from it. Thank you all for your evidence.