Issue 84 / Dec 2017/Jan 2018
December 2017/January 2018 issue of Bido Lito! Featuring LO FIVE, TAYÁ, NICK POWER, MAC DEMARCO, LIVERPOOL MUSIC WEEK 2017 REVIEW and much more. Plus a special look at our need for space and independent venues, coinciding with a report into the health of Liverpool's music infrastructure.
December 2017/January 2018 issue of Bido Lito! Featuring LO FIVE, TAYÁ, NICK POWER, MAC DEMARCO, LIVERPOOL MUSIC WEEK 2017 REVIEW and much more. Plus a special look at our need for space and independent venues, coinciding with a report into the health of Liverpool's music infrastructure.
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Meraki<br />
The Zanzibar<br />
In order to help find the answers to these questions, we put<br />
together an event with our friends at Constellations in May <strong>2017</strong>,<br />
which looked to ask you – Liverpool’s music community – what<br />
you think, gauge your experiences and harness your ideas about<br />
how we can collectively shape Liverpool’s music future. The event<br />
was designed to challenge you to come together and develop a<br />
shared, collective vision of a music future for our city. Because<br />
you all live and breathe it every day.<br />
Let’s be honest, for people outside of the inner workings<br />
of Liverpool’s music community we can seem somewhat<br />
impenetrable; a web of complex entangled relationships, a<br />
mesh of freelancers and small organisations, a tension between<br />
commerce and creativity, a hotchpotch of vested interests, a<br />
fallback position of ‘us versus them’. Historically, viewing us lot<br />
in such a way would not have been without base; entrenched<br />
divisions and internal politics have in the past stifled collaboration<br />
and collective action.<br />
But we believed things could be different and that we could<br />
come together for the common good. And we believe we have<br />
been proved right.<br />
Within this month’s Bido Lito! you will find a copy of<br />
Liverpool, Music City? Challenges, Reflections and Solutions<br />
from the Liverpool Music Community, the final project report<br />
produced in partnership between ourselves and LJMU (check out<br />
liverpoolmusiccity.co.uk if someone’s nicked yours). The report<br />
is the result of painstaking analysis of data captured at our May<br />
event and associated online surveys.<br />
The report is essentially a listening exercise, an opportunity<br />
for the music community to have its voice heard. Coming through<br />
loud and clear are issues surrounding property, the closure of<br />
venues and wider challenges of the built environment – such<br />
as noise complaints and developer power. There is the need for<br />
new strategies that bring the city’s music heritage offer much<br />
closer to the city’s vibrant year-round live music culture. There is<br />
a need to open up access to Liverpool’s music culture – both in<br />
terms of audiences and artists – to people of all backgrounds. The<br />
ongoing financial challenges to artists are stark and consistent.<br />
The starting embers of a music industry in the city are there, but<br />
this urgently needs support. There is a consistent, loud and vocal<br />
cry for structured strategic thinking around music policy with the<br />
city’s music sector at its heart.<br />
This project is not intended to provide a masterplan or a road<br />
map for the future. It is purely intended to demonstrate the music<br />
sector’s ability to galvanise, our appetite for a collective solution<br />
and a desire to work in dynamic partnership with the city to<br />
shape a new music future for Liverpool.<br />
Following our Liverpool, Music City? event on 4th May<br />
<strong>2017</strong> – which has provided the data for this project – Liverpool<br />
City Council (through Culture Liverpool) commissioned BOP<br />
Consulting to produce a report on the music sector of the city.<br />
The report seeks to “outline the importance of the sector to the<br />
city, provide an analysis of how the sector currently operates and<br />
suggest ways of enabling it to reach its potential to meet City<br />
and City Region priorities” (Liverpool City Council). We warmly<br />
welcome this move from the city and await the report’s findings<br />
and suggestions – due in the coming weeks – with anticipation.<br />
Watching You’ll Never Walk Alone today, you’re left with a<br />
sense of cruel irony; the musicians, renegades and heroes that<br />
play centre stage had each other, a vibrant, collective community<br />
of support, but one which was left alone. Kept well away from<br />
the corridors of power and influence. Completely ignored and<br />
absent from civic thinking. Cut adrift. The community was left<br />
alone to its own devices, left to find its own way, left to navigate<br />
the backwaters of the music industry. Today, the experience<br />
can be different. Working with our universities and the city, we<br />
can craft a new music future – once we have a seat at the table.<br />
Together, we can shape a city that rightly has music embedded<br />
at its heart. !<br />
Words: Craig G Pennington<br />
Photography: Keith Ainsworth / arkimages.co.uk<br />
liverpoolmusiccity.co.uk<br />
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