Curriculum

Lecture Description:

The workshop explores the agency and activism of the individual musician or collective within the wider ecology of the music industries. While problematising our understandings of the music industries, our focus will be on ‘industry’ as the creative act of making things happen while questioning the accepted status quo of such industrial monoliths as the major record labels and dominant streaming services.

Music as birth right and vocation have come increasingly under threat in many parts of our world through cuts to educational resourcing and to the general devaluation of original music in the advent of digital streaming and, latterly, with the looming spectre of generative AI. Where for a relatively short period in our modern history it was possible to make at least a modest living from writing, performing and recording original music, this has in recent times become an ever more challenging career path.

After first being honest about the many pressures facing today’s musicians, we will explore innovative ways to fight back through our individual agency and by applying our collective creativity in making a happy and rewarding space for ourselves an often hostile economic and cultural environment. The workshop will aim to encourage participants to develop new ways of thinking about the ‘business’ of music towards arriving at fresh strategies to ensure the sustainability of our cultural lives.