Welcome to the 2018 Full Spectrum Symposium
The 2018 Full Spectrum Symposium took place on March 24. Here are the welcome remarks delivered by professor of music Deirdre Loughridge:
Hello everyone. I’m Deirdre Loughridge, professor of music here at Northeastern University, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2018 Full Spectrum Symposium. I’d like to thank Northeastern University’s office of institutional diversity and inclusion, and the department of music, for the funding and support that has made this event possible. Thanks also to Rebekah Moore, Melissa Rorech, Kara Kokinos, and Andrew Goldberg for their help with key aspects of putting this event together. We have a fabulous line up of speakers today, coming from New York City, Pittsburgh, and our own Boston area, to share with us their insights and experiences working in music industry and music technology. All of them have done, and continue to do, groundbreaking work that can help address a set of questions that will run, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground throughout the day:
How are streaming platforms changing who succeeds in the music industry?
How can musicians “make it” on their own terms? (to which we might add, what does “making it” mean?)
What can be done to increase access and lower barriers to entry for young or aspiring musicians?
What technological innovations are needed to help diverse musical communities thrive?
Questions about how to sustain a musical career are perennially relevant. But it’s especially important to think about such questions now in their broader social, cultural and technological context, when on the one hand we have a rapidly changing ecosystem for music creation and consumption and on the other hand we have all-to-slow moving institutions and biases that create an uneven playing field for people based on things like gender, sexuality, and race. This confluence puts us at a prime moment of opportunity for forging a more diverse and inclusive future for the music industries and music technology. And our speakers, coming from the front lines of these fields, can help us see the challenges and multiple pathways laying before all of you here today.
I’m a historian of music, so I’d like to put this moment in some historical perspective – turning back the clock a little bit to the 1990s. Here is what pop music critic and scholar Eric Weisbard wrote about the 90s just after they ended:“[The 90’s] wasn’t the age of hip-hop, new country, alternative rock, or teen pop. It was the age of everything… the 90’s deserve to go down as the decade when the music industry opened its doors to all comers. Openmindedness, rather than any single sound, was its great contribution: a lesson in diversity.” Ok, so why would the top-selling music of the 90s be newly diverse? Did the culture suddenly change from rock-and-pop-centric to more musically openminded and diverse in the 90s? Or was there some other important factor…what happened in 1991…?
Soundscan. Previously, albums’ popularity rankings on the billboard charts were based on manual reporting by record stores, with employees submitting sales guesstimates that were biased towards rock and pop. Soundscan automated sales data, and for the first time a rap album hit no. 1, with N.W.A. This chapter in history might lead us to believe that more automation means less human bias, means more truth and more diversity. However, as is even more clear now with streaming data, things are not so simple. Institutions like Billboard are making decisions about what counts and how much, with implications for both musicians’ livelihoods and our understanding of musical culture in America. As a culture writer and music reporter, David Turner has looked at these kinds of data-driven developments in the music industry, which we’ll have the opportunity the discuss with him later this morning.
The case of Soundscan relates to a question that came up a lot last semester when I taught a course on music and gender called “Divas, DJs, and Double Standards.” The question was, when we see a lack of diversity in the music industry or music technology, what’s the nature of the problem? Is it that women or people of color are not entering the field? Or is it that they are doing awesome things in the field, but that their work is not recognized, is invisible or discounted by the journalists, the canonizers, the people who bestow awards and shape narratives. Often, both problems are at play, and they feed off each other. For instance, a recent study from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative showed dramatic underrepresentation of women across key creative roles, based on an analysis of pop songs on the Billboard Hot 100 year end charts from 2012 through 2017:
As you can see, the percentages of women artists, songwriters and producers are very low, with the most extreme underrepresentation occurring for women of color in music production.
A recent headline about the death of the electric guitar, on the other hand, was based not on systematic data collection and statistical analysis so much as the gut feeling of people disturbed by the diminished presence of “guitar heroes” in popular culture. Such narratives of death are often partial and distorted - a result of failing to see what is in fact flourishing, when what’s flourishing doesn’t precisely match the image or mold one had in mind:
In rock music, there’s a long history of blindness to the work of black and women artists – exemplified by the fact that only this year is electric guitar pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe finally being inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame.
I would suggest there is a similar blinkerdness behind claims that the music industry dead or dying.
Ok, one version is in decline. But what is flourishing? And what new opportunities are there to create sustainable careers and thriving musical communities?
Sustainability and community: these are concepts that shift the focus from billboard and Spotify to the local.
Listening to local music matters, argued a recent article I've taken, ironically, not from our local Globe but from the Washington Post:
Or maybe that’s not so ironic, since one possibility of the online environment is to provide a lot of what is so wonderful about a local scene without the same geographical constraints – to allow me to access and really dig into what is going on in, say, DC. Creating musical communities is something musicians Rekha Malhotra, Evan Greer and Erin Barra can shed light on at the roundtable this afternoon. And Kelly Hiser, CEO of Rabble, will share with us her company’s work creating online platforms designed to support and sustain local music communities.
To conclude the day, we’ll have a chance for general reflection and further discussion led by our own Northeastern professors Rebekah Moore and David Herlihy, who bring their expertise in global music industries and music licensing among other areas. One of the special things about being at Northeastern is that we’re not here just to learn how to play the game. We’re learning when, why and how to re-write the rules – not carelessly like Uber, but with a sense of responsibility as global citizens, valuing sustainability, community, creativity, diversity and inclusion. Also as musicians and music lovers, we have honed a skill – listening – that is essential for understanding how our actions impact others in the world. I am so excited to listen to our guests today, and to the questions and comments you all bring to the conversations.