Sector Meeting New Music ’24
On February 15, 2024, MATRIX [New Music Centre] and Flanders Arts Institute organized a sector meeting on music publishing, in collaboration with Forum de la Création Musicale and ComAV. The sector meeting took place in Brussels within the 4th Belgian Music Days festival.
MUSIC PUBLISHING
Is there still a future for CDs? Do we want to surf along on the vinyl revival? Embrace streaming or avoid it altogether? There are endless ways to release your music. The streaming revolution has turned the music industry upside down, introducing new rules and shaping new listening behaviors. How do music creators view this? With the expanding possibilities, the challenges have grown even bigger. Moreover, all music genres respond differently to these evolutions and have their own ideas about what publishing music should be.
During this sector meeting Ward Bosmans (Flanders Arts Institute) took stock of the Belgian contemporary music sector, addressing the most relevant questions:
- What gets released? How accessible is our music through streaming platforms? Are we still producing CDs and vinyl?
- What are the preferences in our sector, the individual needs, ambitions, and challenges? What do we want to release, and why? Do we want to be out there with our music, to deliver a full artistic concept album, or do we wish to capture a best possible live experience of the music?
- What is the best way to release? Who do we engage with? Which labels are there in Belgium? Or should we start self-releasing?
- How do we fund our releasing projects?
Find Ward’s presentation (self-)releasing music, in Belgium, in context here (including the inexhaustible list of (small) labels).
Interesting links: Flanders Arts Institute, Sabam for Culture
Many projects result from fruitful collaborations. Yet there is often still much work to be done when it comes to fair practices. On November 13, 2023, ECSA (European Composer and Songwriter) published its report Navigating the Path to Fair Practice. In this report ECSA investigates in how the music industry responds to the key principles of fair practice: transparency, solidarity, sustainability and trust. The report shows that all too often music creators have to deal with opaque contracts, a weak negotiation position, unpaid artistic work, skewed streaming revenues, and mysterious algorithms.
We invited Esther Gottschalk, director of the Association of Dutch Composers Nieuw Geneco, vice-chair of ECSA’s ECF Committee (focused on issues affecting composers of contemporary music), and member of the Fair Practice Code focus group, to shed a light on how to create a fair climate to artists. In her keynote she presented the main insights and recommendations of the ECSA report. She also talked about the actions and successes of the Fair Practice Code, an initiative by the art sector in the Netherlands, and how Nieuw Geneco implemented the Fair Practice Code and got awarded with the fair practice award. Esther concluded her keynote introducing us to the New Music Now platform, promoting contemporary music in all possible forms (calendar tips, music videos, interviews, playlists…), and the yearly Dag van de Componist, a national festival celebrating contemporary music by Dutch composers.
Find Esther’s presentation here.
Interesting links: ECSA, ECSA Report: Navigation the Path to Fair Practice, Nieuw Geneco, New Music Now
More interesting links:
- Juist is Juist (what’s right is right) defines clear and fair principles and practices for collaborating in the arts sector (including tools and recognizable cases).
- ComAV (Componistenarchipel Vlaanderen) developed a Honorariumtabel as a reference tool for good practice in negotiations with commissioners.
- Forum de la Création Musicale (formerly known as the Forum des Compositeurs) promotes the work of all composers in the Wallonia-Brussels Fedaration.
Just out: The guidebook to self-releasing your music. We invited composer Matthew Whiteside to present his fresh published guide for composers, sound artists and performers who want to self-release. The book is a sharp and clear step-by-step guide designed to help music creators find their way in publishing music, and to inform about the latest technology and industry developments. While the book is written from a UK perspective, it is nevertheless highly inspiring.
During his presentation he gave away a handful good-to-knows, like
- Think of yourself as a business
- Set a realistic budget
- Be as prepared as possible for a recording session (time is money):
- Think about takes à divide your score in sections
- Develop a quick and clear notation system to take notes and annotate the different takes à makes editing and next recording sessions much more easier
- Justify extra takes: think about why you want performers to do something again
- Mixing: know what you wat à use reference recordings to have your mixing and mastering engineers get the idea of what you want
- The release date is not the end: marketing campaign and PR continues
Find Matthew’s presentation here.
Interesting links:
- Sabam (the Belgian Association of Authors, Composers and Publishers)
- Playright (by artists, for artists, Playright collects, manages and distributes neighboring rights to performing artists in Belgium)
- SIMIM (Belgian company for the collective management of neighboring rights of the music producers)
- The website of BE (the support centre for the artists and the music industry in Flanders and Brussels) provides plenty of useful knowledge, research and tools for music creators.
Looking for inspiring stories and good practices in the Belgian music sector, we gathered music creators with different profiles around the table for a panel discussion. We welcomed Ann Eysermans (composer-performer releasing music with the label Cortizona), McCloud Zicmuse (versatile artist who is self-published), and Gerrit Geerts (general manager of Het Collectief, whose music is released by Outhere). Unfortunately Bruno Letort (festival director of Ars Musica and label owner and founder) wasn’t able to join us due to force majeure.
Here are some highlights from the discussion:
Releasing music as a way of communicating and capturing a momentum
McCloud: “It stems from a, of course very obvious, desire to share what is going on inside of my mind with a public.”
Gerrit: “At a certain moment there is an urgency by the musicians to capture a piece of the repertoire in a recording. Maybe as a kind of legacy?”
Ann: “Twenty years ago I was creating scores just for myself, it didn’t communicate with an audience or a potential audience. (…) But two years ago I did a very special project for Europalia’s festival TRAINS & TRACKS with trains of the NMBS, so I decided to make an album on vinyl out of it.”
Publishing on a physical carrier or online
Ann: “I just like vinyl.”
McCloud: “I’m not someone who constantly listens to music, and when I do, I’d like to take time: I feel like vinyl and other mediums where you actually take time to put the object to something gives you that moment where you can actually connect to the music that you’re listening to. (…) I still produce cassettes, because I like this medium. It’s a total artwork: I’m releasing my own music, printing my own covers. These objects are an expression of my art, and it’s nice seeing someone taking it home.”
Gerrit: “It’s an artistic discussion: we ask ourselves if it does make any sense to bring out CDs. A CD is also important for airplay. But we started to think that, besides bringing out CDs, we should record some concerts. So we launched ‘live & unedited’ on our YouTube channel with live and unmastered recordings of concerts. The important thing is to spread the word (or: our sound), and convince programmers of our concert programmes, but I think students listen to our live recordings too.”
To release music with a label or self-release
Gerrit: “For us the success of working with our label is the international reviews we get thanks to their network. They have a very good international distribution.”
Ann: “Their worldwide network and distribution, the press connections,… I couldn’t do it on myself. My way of working before was similar to McCloud’s – I did everything: I created small secret packages with my album on cd, with poems and artwork. But I always printed only 27 copies, and gave it to people as a gift. It remained very small. Now, collaborating with my label, I exist as an artist, also internationally.”
McCloud: “I found myself in a position where the label wasn’t a way to get higher in my career. I was still doing a lot of promotional work for myself, booking my own concerts,… I don’t think it’s for everybody. It takes a lot of energy, patience, and time. Negotiating is probably the most difficult part, you know the facts and figures of what the engagement is worth, you can’t take it personally when people decline.”
What to look for in a label? Or what does it take to self-publish?
Ann: “Distribution, network, freedom. Look for one that is good for you, in an artistic way.”
Gerrit: “You need two things: mutual trust, but also a good portion of luck”.
McCloud: “I have zero advice. If you have the patience to do it, that’s the way to go. It takes a lot of energy, patience, and time. Be ready for that, and believe in what you do."
Esther Gottschalk is the Director of the Association of Dutch Composers Nieuw Geneco, representing more than 320 composers of classical, contemporary and art music in the Netherlands.
She is a strong defender and promotor of the artistic, economic and sociocultural interests of composers and raises awareness for Fair Pay, Fair Share and Fair Chain in art music. Esther Gottschalk is encouraging wider support and additional financial flows and contribute to a greater visibility of composers working in the Netherlands.
She is the founder of New Music NOW, the independent foundation that promotes art music and infiltrates cities, festivals, conferences; founder of the annual Dutch Composers Day (Dag van de Componist) and New Music Network. She is an active member, and former Board member of the European Composers and Songwriters Alliance (ECSA), Vice Chair of ECSA’s ECF Committee, Co-founder and interim Chair of the Dutch Creative Coalition, member of the Fair Practice Code focus group, initiator of the Gender Balance & Diversity Working group of Nieuw Geneco and founder of the Nieuw Geneco Fair Practice Awards.
As a cultural entrepreneur, Esther Gottschalk is the Director of Gottschalk Cultural Advice, research and cultural consultancy for cultural institutions, festivals, collectives and funds, such as the National Mondriaan Fund, Lucebert Foundation, Parkstad Limburg Theaters, Schrit_tmacher Just Dance Festival, Cultural Capital Maastricht + Euregion, new music ensemble Nieuw Amsterdams Peil. She was the placemaker and founder of YXIE, centre for word, image and sound in Alkmaar. Previously, she was director of the FKU, the national trade association for art centers and art libraries.
Recently she wrote “Fair Chain; proposing alternative models for a circular value chain for culture” (in the context of the National Labor Market Agenda for Culture and Creative Industries), together with composer/researcher Jan-Bas Bollen.
www.nieuwgeneco.nl / www.newmusicnow.nl
Matthew Whiteside is an award-winning composer and concert producer based in Glasgow, enjoying a dual career as composer and the Artistic Director of The Night With…
Recent work has included Emptiness for United Strings of Europe and Emily Thorner, Night Thoughts, commissioned by Crash Ensemble for New Music Dublin and shortlisted in the 2021 Scottish Awards for New Music, a short opera Little Black Lies commissioned by Scottish Opera Connect, with libretto by Helene Grøn, Quartet No. 4 (Entangled) commissioned by the Institute of Physics for the 2018 NI Science Festival and Ground, Air, Life commissioned by the Glasgow Barons. In 2024 he published The Guidebook for Self-Releasing Your Music to help composers and performers understand the process of releasing music. This develops on his educational work mentoring composers and performers on how to run their music business.