#2. Fragmentation by design
It’s a feature not a bug.
We frequently describe the music sector as fragmented. It’s a claim made in frustration when the otherwise celebrated diversity of views becomes inconvenient to our joint efforts to speak to politicians and policy makers in “one voice”. I argue that we have institutionalised this fragmentation by building interest representation organisations around diverse narratives of how the music world operates. These organisations are crucial to our efforts of giving a voice to various groups in the music ecosystem who might otherwise be marginalised or remain invisible and powerless. This benefit, however, comes at a cost. Organising representation for specific interests at scale makes the fragmentation institutional. It takes place through at least three processes: 1) the simplification of interests; 2) the distance between the base and the specialised core; and 3) the necessary self-preservation reflex of organisations. Have we institutionalised different perspectives to how music works to the point of crippling any holistic approach to common problems? I don’t know, but I propose a few ways to pursue countermeasures.
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Collective interest representation is good
Collective interest representation also amplifies fragmentation
A policy maker’s view to the zoo
Music is fragmented. I have heard and read this claim as often as I have spoken and written it myself. This often refers to a generally felt lack of clarity around how the music world works, who is doing what and why. Human societies are complex, so what else is new? This becomes an issue for music policy making where clarity of message is key to cut through the noise. We often look with some envy towards other “sectors” who seem to be doing it well or at least better – the film and lately video games sector to name a few in the CCSI family.
What is the problem? Diversity of opinion and plurality of views is in itself a good thing, no less the very foundation of a democratic society. We only start calling it fragmentation when the diversity of views becomes inconvenient to our joint political endeavours and when we are not able to communicate effectively among each other and collectively towards politicians and policy makers. And when we fail to synthesise and prioritise the most important current needs that we believe deserve policy attention. “We” in all the above stands for all the people in the music sector mandated or driven to represent (read: speak for) the music sector towards policy makers and politicians.
To make things more complicated, on top of the naturally occurring pluralism on the ground, we have built an institutional layer of representative organisations giving a collective voice and advocacy muscle to the many and variously constructed groups of music sector actors. Authors, performers, artists and artist managers, record producers, music publishers, educators, festivals, music venues and so on – all have some organisation that is tasked with representing their specific interests in the sector more broadly, in the public sphere, and in policy making. In my previous article I made a brief tour of some of the main concepts we use to tell stories of how the music world works – “sector”, “industry”, “scene” and “ecosystem”. All these and others provide many different configurations and rationales for interest representation. There are various trade associations, unions, networks, platforms and collective management organisations for authors, performers, producers of recordings and other groups.
Collective interest representation is good
I’m not in any way suggesting that collective representation is a problem. Quite the opposite. We need more of this in the music sector as in many countries in Europe and elsewhere there are some groups in national or regional music sectors with no one to speak for them or bring them together. I believe the lack of professional and established collective interest representation is one of the main causes the music sector in many countries got hit so badly in the COVID crisis. When the governments scrambled together crisis relief programmes, the cultural sectors that are full of freelancers and part-timers often lacked the infrastructure, professional skills, experience and established communication channels with policy makers to effectively point out the lacks and gaps in these programmes. New organisations were launched, but there is only so much you can do over night.
The Collective Management Organisations can leverage the collective voice of thousands of authors or other rights holders to bring at least some balance to otherwise massively asymmetric power relations in situations where single creative persons would be trying to negotiate directly with huge media corporations. Trade associations can create a platform for exchange and learning internally as well as crafting a coherent narrative of an industry externally. These are just a few examples of the benefits an effective sectoral organisation can bring.
Collective interest representation also amplifies fragmentation
However, all these goods come at a cost. Organising representation for specific interests at scale drives the institutionalisation of fragmentation. It takes place through at least three processes: 1) the simplification of interests; 2) the distance between the base and the core; and 3) the necessary self-preservation reflex of organisations.
1. The simplification of interests
A representative organisation is built on a fairly clear profile of those it is meant to bring together and represent. Yet, any membership of even modest size is bound to be diverse. A group of festivals or record producers will have members that are bigger and smaller, more commercially or artistically oriented, from urban or rural environments, scene specific or broad and eclectic in scope, etc. A musicians’ union would unite featured and non-featured artists of various levels of success, from different scenes and with diverse views on music, life and their role in it.
Furthermore, it’s commonplace that an artist is also an author, a producer of events and records and teaches on the side. Or that a music entrepreneur runs businesses across the main industries (I think the traditional 360° business model is too two-dimensional of a metaphor for today's variety). Wearing many hats gives (ideally) a more spatial view of the practical issues on the ground and daily decision making likely includes regular compromises between the various needs of the many hats. Such people are possibly members of several representative organisations. This is the organic diversity on the ground. Human societies are diverse and so is the music sector.
To effectively function as a representative organisation, this diversity needs to be managed. More specifically, it needs to be filtered, condensed, purified and distilled into a clear fluid of a few coherent bullet points or paragraphs summarising the essence, the value offered to the society, and the needs of the group. Nothing less will be workable for political and policy making purposes where no one has time nor patience for vagueness and ambiguity when it comes to the “ask”. There need not be anything sinister about this process. As I’ve written before, a healthy representative organisation can outwardly maintain a coherent identity and clear messages, while internally providing a venue for constructive debates on the most important issues. The efforts to manage the diversity of views and needs among the membership are at best earnest and efforts are made to avoid excessive marginalisation.
Nevertheless, and again evoking John Law’s brilliant turn of thought, for practical reasons the organisations need to distort reality into clarity1. The diverse views, experiences and needs must be synthesised into a simple-enough story. Thus, an idealised exemplum of the represented actor is forged, a simplified archetype assumed to stand for a significant portion of the group. The effects of this go beyond merely tactical, some of this simplification gets engraved into the missions and strategic goals of these associations, or in other words, their organisational DNA.
2. The distance between the base and the specialised core
Gathering a group of similar actors, taking note of their needs and then communicating them as a list of demands or recommendations to anyone who cares to listen is the crudest and probably least effective form of advocacy. Policy making is not a rational stepwise process2, but a complex, often chaotic jumble of practices, interests, beliefs, ideological convictions, strategic calculations and a constant scramble to manage the uncertainty of real life events hurtling at you in real time. Professional interest representation is informed of these intricacies of policy making as well as able to follow the political head or tail winds of certain issues. Getting from a vaguely perceived need in the represented segment to a polished proposal for policy action requires specific expertise, takes time and also careful timing.
To develop such capacity, the organisation needs to move beyond an elected executive board who are unlikely to be specialists in advocacy and policy making. Specialised staff is needed, a core of expertise with a proactive approach to interest representation. These experts will ideally have the professional knowledge, experience and networks to translate the needs of the membership into actionable recommendations for policy makers. Beyond sculpting the simplified archetype mentioned in the previous section, they will select and prioritise issues, link them with bigger political agendas and currents and identify potentially sympathetic politicians or policy makers to target. They will also be able to translate the organisation's agenda into the discourse (read: keyword speak) of the latest high-level political agenda.
Thus, a distance is born between the regular members, represented by an elected board who in turn oversees an expert core of advocacy and interest representation3. It’s a distance in expertise – a regular member is unlikely to have an understanding about what and why exactly is being done at the core. And it’s a distance in simplification and translation of the issues represented. An expert at the core will by the necessity of time constraints have a limited understanding of the real diversity and nuance of the various issues as viewed among the membership. A regular member, in turn, might find the way policy proposals are articulated fairly foreign or entirely unintelligible due to the specificity of the language.
This distance is part and parcel of the representation game. It becomes a potential issue, however, when in the policy making venue complex problems are being negotiated and compromises need to be crafted. The policy positions distilled and simplified will simply have much less contextual space for improvisation and reconfiguration. The diversity and richness of understanding of the lived experiences of the broad membership base is not readily available to the specialist core. There is a metaphoric similarity to the loss of biodiversity when aiming for efficiency gains through monoculture, but this might suggest as if I’m criticising the necessary narrowing and simplification of the interests for effective use in interest representation. I’m not. Again, this is not a bug of the arrangement, but the list price of it.
I have to admit, in most cultural and especially music sectors in Europe, it would be rare to see that evolved and specialised interest representation. More often the reasons for rigidity or misalignment in the positions of representative organisations can be due to more or less well-meaning lack of experience or professionalism among elected board members. Such as inability to transcend one’s personal experience and opinions to include a broader view, or personal opportunism and power play.
3. The necessary self-preservation reflex of organisations
Once you organise a group of people around a mission or an idea and manage processes to sustain it, some skeletal structure is needed to hold it all up. For all our nimbleness of thought and limb, we need a spine to stand in the first place. Procedures, rules, routines and workflows help organisations to build a repertoire of approaches to deal with the complexity and chaos of the rest of the human society. Regularity is a crucial component of reliability which in turn breeds legitimacy. Soon after being born, an organisation also needs to develop self-preservation reflexes, that is, strategies and actions not always directly deriving from its mission, but serving the continuance of the organisation itself, so that it could strive towards the mission4.
Over time, the repertoire of rules, norms and behaviours settles and might become viewed as the tradition of the organisation. Therein also lies the danger of slipping out of touch with the changing realities in the sector and needs of the membership. It’s when you step on the clutch not to shift gears, but simply to remove the friction between the engine and the wheels. Yes you’ll grind to standstill eventually, but you’ll do so comfortably. Large organisations can potentially cruise for years while ignoring the changes in their environment.
The tension between remaining agile and responsive to change and a need for orderly and transparent decision making and organised processes which are necessarily slower than any frantic scramble must be continuously navigated and cannot be resolved. Successful organisations are adaptive, but not overly impulsive and hasty. Changing one’s position too fast risks being, as well as perceived as, fickle or inconsistent and might upset a partnership that is useful for various strategic reasons. Being less than insistent in protecting the interests of your membership and backing away from positions already staked can seem weak. When constructing a public discourse about who you represent, what their value offer is to the sector and the society, and why their agenda deserves political or policy attention, there is strategic gain to be had from (over)emphasising strengths and downplaying contentious issues. Organisations playing the interest representation game have therefore various strategic investments and tactical commitments that are not always first and foremost derived from the broader mission, but geared towards maintaining a strong position on the board and a reputation of a good player. It has its costs, but it’s worth it as you can only occasionally play your hand if you have a regular seat at the table.
The organisational dynamics outlined above are all optimising for effective representation of a specific group with clearly defined interests. While compromises are commonplace, there is an inherent competitiveness as the measure of success is connected to these narrowly defined groups, not any vague sense of general good. In some sense we have taken the organic grassroots pluralism and diversity, organised it into various groups based on different concepts (and industry, a scene, etc.), designed artificially clear narratives about those groups’ identities and their interests, and entered the competitive landscape of political attention. From this view, it’s fragmentation by design. And for many issues this landscape works really well! So what is the problem?
A policy maker’s view to the zoo
In Europe, the various organisations representing some or other groups in the music sector count in many tens on the European level and probably grow into thousands on national and regional levels. When viewed from a policy maker's desk, it can seem a veritable zoo of creatures, all with a story to tell. However attentively you listen to them (us), the many pieces of the puzzle won’t add up to a coherent picture. To engage in proper debates and deconstruct the jumble of arguments to its constituent parts, uncovering biases, motivated reasoning and at times blatant opportunism would require significant in-house capacity and proper data-based information and insights. Most ministries of culture in Europe have one perhaps two advisors for a cultural sector. An alternative would be extensive consultations with the sector representatives and let the inconsistencies and contentious issues be exposed and ironed out in serious debates. This can and most likely has solved a number of issues where reasonable compromises are tenable while all parties can save face.
What about issues that are truly complex, contentious and would require a deeper rethink of how the sector operates? Adapting to the needs of fighting climate change or realities of fast-changing technologies; dealing with unsustainable career and business models for most in a winner-takes-all attention economy; finding a meaningful role for music in increasingly divided societies, etc. How well are our organisations fit for purpose for dealing with new types of challenges? When needed, are they able to transcend the particular perspective of the specific group whose interests they are created to serve? Especially if that particular community of actors has vested interests to maintain the status quo. What would be the format and the venue to discuss the big issues of the music sector on a high level while checking sectarian interests at the door?
I’m aware we have all sorts of superstructures, like associations of associations and umbrellas of associations of associations. These regularly organise public statements in highly generalised language signed by many stakeholder organisations. I do believe this serves a necessary communicative function, drawing and maintaining political attention while shaping a discourse of important issues for the music (or more broadly cultural) sector. However, this won’t compel the much-needed in-depth debates within the sector (why exactly is a topic for another article).
Fragmentation beyond repair?
Have we institutionalised different perspectives to how music works to the point of crippling any holistic approach to common problems? If so, are holistic approaches to complex problems possible in the current institutional landscape of the music sector? I don’t know. But we should definitely try to avoid the above-described pitfalls. I’m proposing 3 directions for this.
1. Useful expertise
We need better heuristics for expertise. How many years a person has worked in an industry is not a reliable proxy for generalised and deeper insights about the sector or an industry as such. Especially when it comes to navigating broader trends, such as the impact of AI or the green transition. We often tend to populate expert groups, consultations and panels with tenured industry veterans or representatives of representative organisations. While sometimes these can be people with solid understanding and valuable insights, they often tend to have intuitive and non-specific (read: not especially informed) opinions. If we want to gain insights into issues such as how AI will impact the music sector or how to green the sector, we need to consult knowledgeable experts with real track record, not (only) experienced music sector people with opinions.
2. Balanced knowledge creation
Neutral knowledge about the human world is not really possible, but we need balanced research and analysis. Reports done or commissioned by sector organisations representing specific interests are naturally biassed, relying on motivated reasoning to confirm the story they have built up over the years. This is not a criticism, they are doing their job which is interest representation and not deep critical research.
We have massive gaps in data collection about the sector, but also systematic problems of connecting existing datasets up for more insightful analysis. Of course, there is academic research, but it tends to live in a parallel universe and progress at a different tempo than the fast-paced needs of sectoral policy making. The incentive (read: funding) structures are not properly connected. Horizon Europe is all but unusable for policy-relevant knowledge creation (other than perhaps cultural heritage). Also, academic researchers cannot create data out of thin air. If we as a sector will not come up with ways to enable more collaborative access to various data sets, no one will. Whether research projects or some more stable institutional structures – we need to figure out ways for more balanced knowledge creation about how the music ecosystem works.
3. Open forum for real debates
Public consultations with the sector tend to veer into paddling pre-rehearsed talking points by sector organisations and not real and open discussions. It’s a problem of resources and formats. A 6 hour event with policy makers cannot accommodate all topics important for all stakeholders, so instead of a meaningful discussion we end up listing headings of topics we should address and not having any time to actually address them. Focusing on a single topic would induce a FOMO among all other topic-holders and be charged with an unequal approach. To calm everyone down and create trust that all issues will receive at least some attention, a regular series of consultations would be needed for an extended period. For many issues we should first spend time amongst ourselves to clarify positions and arguments before even trying to gain policy attention5.
These are just pointers and need much elaboration, but serve to make the point here. If we could organise more meaningful public or closed discussions and forums, that are informed by more balanced knowledge creation and would also feature topic experts initiated into the specifics of the music world, we might just actually be able to meaningfully approach the more wicked issues of our time.
A reflexive post scriptum
I am admittedly speaking from my own specific and narrow experience. I have took part in the building and leading of a few representative organisations, sat on the boards of others and participated in some sectoral consultations and expert groups, but this is a very limited view. In this somewhat abstract essay I have made sweeping generalisations and simplifications to make a few points. A good example in its own right of how a discourse is crafted through highlighting some aspects while downplaying others. There are many sector organisations out there who are doing great work, including being aware of all these naturally occurring limitations and biases I’ve outlined, and taking countermeasures. Still, I hope this makes for a potentially useful caricature to inspire awareness and perhaps spur empirical research into the interest representation function in the music sector.
John Law, “After Method. Mess in Social Science Research'' (2004, 2), but the rephrasing is from Hendrik Wagenaar, “Meaning in Action. Interpretation and dialogue in policy analysis” (2014).
Several theories of the policy process highlight the chaotic and contingent nature of it. The rational model of a policy making cycle as a set of logical steps turned out to be naive already in the 1970s and far more realistic (read also: cynical) models have been proposed ever since. See for example the Garbage Can model or the Multiple Stream model.
Of course, interest representation is rarely the only function of such organisations, simply the focus of this article.
I know this well from my own experience. I launched and managed Music Estonia, the Estonian music industry development centre and an export office, between 2014-2020. We occasionally needed to get involved in projects and activities to secure needed finances or be a cooperative member of the broader sector community, etc.
A good example would be the Kristiansand Roundtable organised for many years by my friend and colleague Daniel Nordgård, a professor at the University in Agder, Norway.