Return(s) on Investment: The Value of Local Music Scenes

British Forum for Ethnomusicology

BFE, Cambridge, England, UK, April 4, 2025.

Co-authored with Jaime Jones.

Abstract

In the 2010s, analyses of music and cultural policy have increasingly turned to assessing and advocating for music’s economic impacts, whether as a component of the creative industries (e.g., Homan, Cloonan, and Cattermole 2015), the “creative class” (Florida 2002/2019), UNESCO’s “creative cities” framework, or “music cities” (e.g., IFPI 2015). In short, policymakers rationalize investing in local music scenes as investing in local economies; in turn, considering the comparative return on investment (ROI) of policy interventions that impact local music. And yet, the benefits of local music scenes to participants, neighbors, and localities are not always easily captured by measures that emphasize economic growth and viability.

Ethnomusicology is well positioned to address this lacuna. Building on Timothy Taylor’s (2024) analyses of noneconomic forms of value produced by and circulating within indie rock and Irish trad music scenes, we demonstrate that local jurisdictions’ objectives for investing in and promoting music, grounded in differing forms of value, can result in distinct and competing goals. Specifically, we consider urban land-use policies and incentives, as well as localized impacts of the globalized music industries’ infrastructures and their technological affordances. We argue that advancing cultural policy initiatives that recognize and prioritize noneconomic forms of value in local music scenes is an important step in preserving and improving their resilience and sustainability. This collaborative paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Dublin, Ireland, and Boston, Massachusetts, USA; over four dozen semi-structured interviews; around 240 survey responses; and experience producing two public-facing digital media projects.