The Cultural Recovery Fund Might Not Be Enough To Save Live Music.
I’m going to let you into a little secret: I’ve never seen ballet performed live. I’ve asked around and it seems like this is a remarkably common secret to bear- one friend said she’d once taken her mum as a Christmas present. I’m going to hazard a guess that I’m not uncommon in having such uncultured friends.
Who then would have thought that an image of a ballerina would become a flashpoint in the pandemic fallout?
“Fatima’s Next Job Could Be In Cyber”. In normal times, this would be the content of a fairly unremarkable government-backed campaign to encourage people into the cybersecurity industry. It’s likely that no one would even have noticed it unless they were already considering a career change.
These, however, are not normal times.
The reaction to the image of a ballerina accompanied by the tagline “Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.” was visceral. #Fatima trended on Twitter within hours of the public becoming aware of the campaign. Memes flooded social media. Oliver Dowden, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and The Arts, even issued a tweet distancing his department, calling the image “crass”.
The campaign was part of an initiative by a government partner which started in 2019 and didn’t actually only target the arts but suggested cybersecurity as a career for people from all walks of life, but, in light of the Covid situation and it’s crushing effect on the arts, the decision to pull this particular image is unsurprising.
The being perceived as attacking the arts when they’re at their lowest ebb is just too negative for the government- even though they have set aside a large fund for cultural recovery.
The Fatima Fiasco ™ has highlighted just how strongly we all feel about the arts- even those as rarefied as ballet.
Why, at a time when people are so unsure of the future and worried about their own financial stability, would a ballerina being told to go get a ‘real’ job strike such a chord? Could it just possibly be that the performing arts actually matter? That secretly, we all sing into the hairbrush and pirouette when no one is watching and cannot bring ourselves to begrudge those who’ve taken their art from the bathroom mirror onto the stage? That far from being some silly luxury hobby, they’re actually viable careers and a vital sector of our economy?
When we think of “the arts” as a phrase we tend to think of the higher end or the esoteric. All of these things are worthy, and in dire need, of the government’s support package. However, no less worthy and no less in need are the small scale local venues who deal in the real coalface of the industry-popular culture like grassroots live music.
Thankfully, most venues which the Music Venue Trust had marked as in imminent danger of permanently closing have received funding to see them through in some form until April, when it’s expected that things should be more like normal.
Despite £257 million of the Cultural Recovery Fund being released this week to help venues, theatres and other cultural hubs keep the lights on and provide a skeleton service, often online, times look grim for many in the sector.
With around 70% of workers in the live music industry currently on furlough, which ends at the end of this month, thousands of skilled technicians, venue staff and related workers have already lost their jobs or face losing them. The venues in which they work are technically able to open but are not currently economically “viable” and therefore not eligible for the replacement to the furlough scheme.
Even before the pandemic, our local live music scenes were precarious, with only one year in the last 10 ending with more venues than it started with. This is perhaps most noticeable in London- a city which regards itself as one of the world’s great cultural capitals.
New research from Hearby- an AI powered live music events aggregator from the US who are branching out to the UK- has turned up some interesting data. Their AI managed to find 144 live music venues across London. In contrast, they found 36 in York- a city almost a tenth of the size.
When split into venues-per-10,000-people that gives York an impressive 2.34 and London a paltry 0.1. When ranked with all the cities that Hearby have scanned with their AI, York ranks number 1 out of 75 cities they looked at across the UK, US and Canada. London comes in at number 72.
Of Further interest in Hearby’s data tables is that through September, even with restrictions at their lightest for months, York and London recorded 19 and 119 shows respectively, suggesting that government intervention may have come too late for far too many careers.
While we should all welcome the Cultural Recovery Fund, which in all fairness is one of the largest in the world and has offered a lifeline to many, these numbers don’t leave much margin for error when it comes to protecting venues and the livelihoods that rely on them.
None of this even touches upon the struggle which full-time professional musicians and other performers continue to face with the reduction of the Self Employed Support Scheme to 20% of average monthly profits.
After 6 months of closures and changing rules, with local lockdowns springing up across the UK and no end in sight, even with this funding in place the grassroots of the creative sector faces a real struggle to keep the wolves from the door. With the necessary restrictions on crowd sizes and operating hours, even with this lifeline, the future looks uncertain.
In the face of years of funding cuts and deriding of training in the arts in favour of STEM subjects and with the uncertainty heaped upon everything by the pandemic, we have to hope that this recent intervention will be enough; else the whole sector still might end up working in cybersecurity alongside Fatima and we all end up poorer.
