BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
With an influx of digital concerts and transitions into online music lessons, it can feel like we are living in a “new normal”, and that music workers are adapting to COVID-19 with a positive approach.
While that may be true, to an extent, it also hints at something going on beneath the surface: music workers are doing what they can to fight for their careers, putting on a brave face to keep working in roles they’ve trained for over the course of their lifetime.
Dr Catherine Strong started digging a little deeper into the way individuals are feeling as they experience the pandemic, and the lockdowns, cancellations, and distancing that come as a consequence. Catherine surveyed Victorian music workers, and found many of them are having a hard time coping — to the extent that they are considering leaving the industry altogether.
The study — which was commissioned by the Victorian Music Development Office and the Victorian Office for Women, and led by Catherine through RMIT University — highlights the risk of Australia losing its talent in a major industry. It’s an industry that fuels the economy, provides more jobs than coal mining, yet more than half of its workers in Victoria alone are struggling to pay for rent and food.
Other findings from the study show that 74 per cent of music workers have seen their income decrease during COVID-19, while 44 per cent have lost their music-related work entirely. And, perhaps most significantly, 58 per cent are thinking about abandoning their careers.
As Catherine says in our interview below, the survey could only have been conducted now. As our industry experiences the impact of the pandemic, she found it necessary to understand the way workers are feeling in the middle of it all. And when asked about the changes they would like to see, music workers called for improved working conditions, cultural changes, and recognition for the work they do.
The results of her survey are alarming — there’s no question about that. But there can be found some positives, including an awareness of these workers’ immediate needs.
We talk with Catherine about her findings in the study ‘Understanding Challenges to the Victorian Music Industry During COVID-19’, and what this could mean for our sector.
Catherine, COVID-19 really started to hit the Australian music industry — and hard — in 2020. And it’s already continuing in 2021. What did it feel like to discover that more than half of the industry’s Victorian workers want to leave?
In our survey, we saw that around three-fifths of people said they were considering leaving the industry. But in addition to that, there were a lot of people who said that the amount of time they would have to spend on their music work — as opposed to other types of work they also needed to do — would need to decrease. So the potential for talent loss from across the industry is very huge, and this is a very concerning possibility.
You’ve said in a statement that this survey “has exacerbated and continued some already existing problems within the Victorian music industry”. How would you have described or summarised this industry landscape before COVID-19?
Before COVID hit, there was already a lot of recognition that there were issues that needed to be dealt with to ensure that people who work in music have a safe and enjoyable work environment that they can be a part of.
In particular, the work was very precarious. The term ‘gig economy’ came originally from music work, so this idea [emerged] that people would work short-term jobs or a lot of different jobs. You would have people who have some work in music and some work outside of music, and a lot of the time the work is also seasonal. So, if you think for instance about road crew, they would have a lot more work available to them in the summertime, especially around the festival season, than they would during the winter. This means for some people they have a lot of income at particular points in time, but they know that they will also have very lean periods.
This is a work pattern that can be very difficult to manage for financial security. It means that it is easy for people to end up in a financially difficult situation through no fault of their own.
This is exacerbated by the way that our society also does not value artistic work in the way that it could, which makes it difficult for people like musicians to always know that they will be able to make ends meet, and to really pursue their craft.
Our society also does not value artistic work in the way that it could, which makes it difficult for people like musicians to always know that they will be able to make ends meet, and to really pursue their craft
At the same time, there has also been a lot of discrimination in the industry. This has been very well documented now in terms of women in particular. We don’t know as much as we could in Australia about how people of colour, how people who are living with disabilities, how First Nations people may be experiencing barriers in the music industry. But we definitely know from studies done elsewhere that these issues are continuing to be a real problem.
While there’s work that’s been done to try to address this – and Victoria has been very much on the front foot in this regard — we still have quite a long way to go.
One of the issues with COVID, of course, with everything being shut down the way it was, is that these things have the potential to get much worse as people become more conservative with the decisions they make in a very risky environment as things open up again.
So tell us about how your survey fits into this picture. What were some of the most valuable pieces of data you discovered?
It was valuable to discover that there was a reasonable amount of people — around a third of respondents — who did find ways to continue with their work, or innovate and take what they were doing in new directions, which meant that they were still thinking about how they could continue in the industry.
In particular, many musicians told us that it was a positive for them in this experience that they had time to try new things with their art that, normally, they just wouldn’t be able to do because they’d be too busy working, gigging, trying to make ends meet.
So I think there is the potential for some very interesting new music to occur in the opening up, as people start to record and perform what they have been working on during the lockdown.
Many of these issues can affect the mental health of arts workers. When the pandemic worsens conditions in a community already vulnerable to these disadvantages, what does this mean for these individuals?
A number of studies over the last few years have shown that workers in the music industry have poorer mental health than the general population. People have theorised that this is to do with the pressures of the industry, and the way that music work can be very much caught up with your own self-image and self-esteem. But it’s also to do with the fact that people are overworked, and it is also an industry that is very unusual in terms of its work patterns. So people work very late at night, they work in environments that are not regulated. They work around drugs and alcohol — it’s normal for those things to be in their in their workplaces. So, it can be difficult for people to maintain healthy habits.
This situation with COVID is likely to exacerbate mental health issues, but paradoxically being out of that very strange work environment may also have some advantages in terms of people’s physical health.
Obviously, the lack of connection during lockdowns in particular is going to probably have negative effects, because one of the things that is positive about the music industry is that it creates strong social bonds between people, and those social bonds are one of the reasons why people are so committed to the industry. The loss of those bonds during this time is one of the things that people told us was quite difficult.
It’s also going to be difficult for people to put their careers back together. And of course, some people just may not do that. The loss of, in some cases, years’ worth of planning — and also in some cases years worth of forward plans as well — is something that has hit people very hard.
So, there does need to be mental health support offered to people who have gone through this experience. There are incredible organisations like Support Act that do some of this work, and ensuring they are well-funded will be an important aspect of this.
Why did you want to interview arts workers who are currently experiencing these challenges, and how do you feel the results may therefore impact their future industry prospects?
I think it was important to do research on people while the lockdown was happening, because it gives us some insight into what that experience was like. I hope we don’t have another lockdown like the one that we had, so this was a one-off opportunity.
And I think once things start up again, people will throw themselves back into trying to get their work back — into getting gigs, booking artists, managing people or whatever they do. They will be thinking differently at that point about what the experience was like. So it was valuable to gather that data at the point that we did, and in particular I think it will help us to understand what the emotional impact was of the shutdown. Because that was a finding that came through very clearly, that people were experiencing it as a very emotional event.
This is an important study not only for Victorian musicians, but for those who listen to music across Australia. What do you feel would be the impact of music workers actually taking steps to leave the industry? That is, what would be the flow-on effects if the 58 per cent really do leave the industry?
What we need to understand about the music industry is that it consists of a whole bunch of interlocking areas that all rely on each other, to some extent, for the survival of everyone. People have described the music industry as an ecosystem. One of the risks, if people start leaving, is that some parts of that ecosystem may not be there anymore.
So if you think for instance about venues, we need a whole bunch of different venues for people to be able to build music careers. We need small venues where people can play their very first gig to 10 people. We need medium sized venues where, as people become more successful, they bring in bigger crowds, and they can move through the process of going to bigger and bigger venues. And we need those huge venues as well, where we have those high-level, top-tier bands who can play to tens of thousands of people. If you take out any of those levels, then it is going to become much more difficult for everybody in the industry.
Everybody in the music industry has their place and their value
What there is a risk of happening now is that you don’t just lose those venues, but you could also lose other parts of the infrastructure that make the venues work. If big companies that do the backstage work were to close down, then how are we going to put on those high-level gigs, or the medium-level ones, for that matter? If we lose a whole bunch of people who manage bands — they just go and get other work somewhere — then is it going to be that much more difficult for bands to find the gigs that they need, or for the gigs to happen in the first place?
So everybody in the music industry has their place and their value. And we need to be keeping a very close eye on who may be leaving, and who is staying, and to try to find ways to support all levels, and all different roles within the industry, to keep everything running as smooth as possible.
It’s certainly alarming. However, one of the things you also mentioned in a statement on release of the report was that the pandemic “enhanced some positive aspects for the sector”, such as creativity and innovation, and the community coming together. Do you feel this is enough to outweigh the negative results, which you’ve seen through this study, and to sustain these artists’ interests in their practice?
There were certainly some positive things that came out of the results of the survey. I mentioned earlier the idea that artists had a chance to try different things, musically, that normally they wouldn’t have the time to do. Some of the other things that came out of it were that people working more on the business side, on the behind the scenes side of the industry; were also expanding their skill set and learning new things.
We do have people saying that the move to doing online gigs had opened up a whole new audience for them, and other people saying that it improved access. So people who were in regional Victoria were saying that the move to online made it much easier for them to participate, whereas sometimes in normal circumstances they felt left out.
There are elements here that people were talking about bringing into their normal practice once the lockdown stops. So that could be a way that music becomes more accessible to more people on an ongoing basis, which would be definitely a positive.
What we could start a discussion around at this point is how we value music work, and how we value the people who want to make it
The other potentially positive outcome would be if new ways of doing things resulted from this crisis. There have been real problems in the music industry in terms of the conditions that people work in, and the poor outcomes in terms of people’s mental and physical health, and financially. What we could start a discussion around at this point is how we value music work, and how we value the people who want to make it, to think about how we could ensure that they have the best possible outcomes in their lives.
I think everybody gets something from music, we all enjoy it to some level or another — it’s an important human activity. But I think there hasn’t been enough of a discussion happening about how the skills and the expertise of the people who created it can be rewarded, and how they can be nurtured and allowed to pursue their craft in the best possible ways.
So how can large-scale Australian arts organisations, and the Australian government, support Victoria’s music sector so these musicians consider staying rather than leaving?
The most obvious way that governments can support the music sector is through money. But that has to be distributed in a way that is equitable, and thought about carefully. We need to make sure that all of the different parts of the industry have been supported, but we also need to make sure that we don’t end up with a music industry that has lost all of its diversity, and that is not accessible for everyone.
The Victorian Government has been great. They have put $25 million already into support for this area. One of the things that is being spoken about a lot at the moment is JobKeeper and the fact that, if it does disappear on the schedule, it has been suggested then this is going to cause a huge amount of hardship.
A study from I Lost My Gig suggested that up to 53 per cent of surveyed businesses might just close if JobKeeper ends at the end of March. So this is something that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
The other thing that needs to happen as well is, we need to think about how we value the work that music workers do, and how that is expressed within society, in a way that translates into them being cared for.
The reports of this survey are available online.
For mental health support, call Lifeline on 131114, contact your GP, or visit Support Act to find out about resources available.
More in Australian music industry research: Cassandra Gibson’s survey is exploring “the sexualisation of Australia’s classical musicians”.
Images supplied.
