This number of Tafter Journal reflects on “music”, and “music industry” as two distinct but, after all, clearly connected phenomena, by highlighting the mutual relationship between “contemporary cultural content” and “contemporary cultural industry”.
Since human beings became citizens of a world bigger than them, they understood the need for production and distribution systems in order to reach any kind of goods and services.
Culture makes no exception.
In this sense, when we look at cultural production, both in the sense of professional production of contents and in the meaning of active consumption of culture, we should fix our attention to the fact that culture need industrial means to survive.
This kind of relationship is even clearer in music production, where the organizational aspects are part of the of the production itself.
This kind of relationship should be clear when we look at music market data.
Focusing on a small-sized country such as Italy is, it is possible to understand it in an easier way: when we discover that, among the 20 Italian regions, two of them, and namely, Lombardy and Lazio, host the 40% of music distribution companies, the 40% of music management companies, the 37% of record labels, the 31% of music events and concert organization agencies, and, the 41% of audience expenditures, we’re not describing only the geographic distribution of music production, we’re defining where, and how, our cultural contents are developed and disseminated.
We can detect the effects of this kind of geographical distribution, or, this sort of this “cultural mechanics” in both the article of this number.
Clementina Casula, in her article, focuses on how artistic and cultural production are key aspects in processes of enhancement of a more inclusive and egalitarian social fabric, by discussing the results of an “empirical qualitative research on two Italian female brass bands, emerging in quite different territorial and organizational contexts, but both contributing to challenge those gender biases, prescriptions and practices still hampering women’s full participation both to music worlds and social life in general”.
On the other hand, the article of Limongelli, that we’ve chosen to re-publish in this issue, reflects on the strong relationship between the rise of innovative start-ups in the music industry and the number of artists involved in the creation of cultural content addressed to niche audiences.
Together, the articles could define a “connection” that should interest many territorial administrators: while most of the music consumption (not including concerts or events) is managed through online platforms, music production still remains an enabling “engine” for territorial development.
This implies further several reflections in the strategic development of our cities: digital marketplaces can be today intended as one of the main distribution channels of music content, and, today, there are more and more young artists starting their careers by simply uploading their works on a social network.
By promoting not only cultural active consumption, but also cultural production, territorial administrators could lead our city in reaching both, the social desired effects that culture produces, and the economic development of a “little music industry”, which could help territorial emerging artists in carrying on their passions without the need to “leave” for the “big city”.
By interpreting our territories as “spots” of bigger networks, our cultural production (music production in this case, but also artistic production could be shaped in this way), could show interesting features also for the development of a production system better fitting also for the exportation of cultural goods and services.
The web taught us the potentialities of networks. We just need to understand that networks work also in the “real world”.
