Hello!
Welcome to this two parter...
1. Is the music industry stuck in a rut and what does it need to do to adapt?
2. Stuck in the Mud - new week, new challenge!
One...
In short - "What is not working in the music industry and what needs to be updated?"
There are a few things in the industry that need to be adapted and modified in this modern day, with fights over ISP law suits, copyright laws and secondary ticketing. one simple thing has been over looked in the UK industry, a fundamental element, the development and education of young people. Specifically music education.
I was very lucky when I was at Secondary School, I went to a creative arts community school, with lots of focus within the arts subjects, however over the last few years this has changed as the education system and surrounding areas have developed. Subjects like Music and Art have been left behind and forgotten about. This mainly came to be when the UK government introduced the EBacc in 2010. Ebacc stands for English Baccalaureate and is what a student enters into by studying: English Literature, English Language, Maths, 2 Sciences, a modern foreign language and either Geography or History at Secondary Education (Key stage 4). (Gov.uk 2019, English Baccalaureate) I studied my GCSE subjects from 2014-2016 and am one of the 60.3% of students who did not enter the EBacc, as well as the core English Literature, English Language, Maths, Triple Science and Geography, I chose to study, ICT, Music and Drama. I did not take on a Modern Foreign Language. Currently the target percentage of students to take on the EBacc at secondary education is set at 75%, and is due to increase to 90% in 2025. However this graph from Music Education: State of the Nation Report (2019), shows that since 2013/14 the amount of students entered into the EBacc at year 11 has barely moved from 38%.
Then looking at Figure 2, only 16.7% of the 38.4% of students who entered the EBacc in 2017/18 actually passed all of the subjects with a C (or grade 5) and above.
What's this got to do with music?
Because of this pressure for schools to take on the EBacc, that pressure is then being put onto students forcing them to drop their creative subjects, this was proved by the University of Sussex in 2018. Their research showed that between 2016 and 2018 there was a decline of 9.8% in the number of students doing GCSE Music, and this figure is estimated to continue to fall due to the lower amount of schools even offering GCSE Music as a subject. In 18% of the schools used for the research there was no GCSE Music on offer to the students. Even further to this, 14.5% of schools that did offer Music as a GCSE, "top set students were guided away from taking Music at KS4 because of the EBacc, whilst in others lower ability students were prevented from taking Music so they could concentrate on EBacc subjects."
However it is not just GCSE Music that is on offer, in some schools there is the alternative, BTEC Music, which focuses more on the performance of music, rather than the theory and history of music. The 2011 National Plan for Music Education says that when young people have access to music education, they are more likely to enjoy a life long connection with music and will positively impact their chances of a career within the creative industries. This also comes from a famous quote:
"Music has a power of forming the character and should therefore be introduced into the education of young." - Aristotle
How does this effect the industry?
The music industry is stuck in a rut with huge over saturation of "average" quality music, this stems back to the lack of education or knowledge that people have on the process of creating and sharing music. With new ways to create and share music every day, from direct uploads to ISP's such as YouTube and Spotify, to apps like Garageband that allow anyone and everyone to create music from their iPhone. But with the lack of prior knowledge this often leads to poor quality music being shared, the market has become so oversaturated that Spotify has a playlist full of songs that have never had a single stream - Forgotify.com.
And Finally - What can we do to fix this?
This is not just something that can be fixed over night, but with focus on grassroots artists and creating opportunities to develop the music education in schools hopefully arts subjects in schools can fight their way through the system to come back into all schools. The State of the Nation Music Report (2019) gives 18 recommendations of what needs to be done to improve the Music Education System, the image below shows a few of these:
Two... Stuck in the Mud
This challenge involved finding a spot and taking 6 photos without moving. This gives a chance to take in your surroundings and see how many different creative images you can take just from one point. They are all creative images in one way or another and each one holds a different symbolic message, some have more meaning than others to different people and it is all subjective depending on the background of the onlooker.
For example bottom left will hold more sentimental value to me and the people within the image than it will to the rest of the world. It shows friendship and human connection with people who have value in the creators life.
Top middle: This image can be interpreted in many ways, for example there is the silhouette of a single person walking down "The Street" in the university, showing a journey for that one person. Secondly the spiral staircase also represents the up and down and turns that life throws. and then in the back ground is the windows out to the "real world".
What do these images say to you? What is the symbolic meaning from your point of view?
Phoebe Ann
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