9th Vienna Music Business Research Days: A Retrospective

In this piece we look back on the 9th Vienna Music Business Research Days, a multi-day event which gathers together researchers and music business professionals for keynote speeches and panel discussions covering important music business goings-on.

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INVITED CONFERENCE DAY ON SEPTEMBER 14^th

In the morning session, Beate Flath, professor at the University of Paderborn, highlighted in her keynote the economic relevance of music festivals for rural regions and small cities. Music festivals, therefore, are highly relevant factors forthe local economy. Festivals generate a significantly higher average expense per head of EUR 36 in France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and in the US than e.g. stadium concerts with EUR 17 per head.

• What about freedom of artistic expression, negative effects of music festivals, like a huge amount of waste, traffic jams, overfill of supermarkets, parking space and accommodation, annoyance by din etc., which are accompanying every festival?
• Is there only the permission for being loud – in the double sense of the word – when the gross domestic product is affected positively?  

In short presentation, Carsten Winter of the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media highlights research results on the benefit of showcase festivals such as the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg for the artists, fans and the business community.

Erik Hitters, professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, tied in with the panel discussion with his keynote on “Live Music Ecologies and Value Creation for Musicians, Industries and Cities” highlighting preliminary results of the Poplive-project on the Dutch live music ecology. The project researches how local live music ecologies can contribute to value creation in the careers of pop musicians, the position of music venues and festivals, and the local (urban) society. In focusing on the Dutch music festivals economy, he highlighted a process of “festivalization”. The number of music festivals in the Netherlands has increased by 32 percent from 708 to 934 from 2012 to 2016. In the same period the number of festival goers has grown by 35 percent. Thus, the festivals contribute significantly to the growth of the Dutch live music market and reflects a changing consumption and experience patterns of the live music audience. Beyond economic value music festivals and the entire Dutch music scene also contributes to social and cultural valuation processes and therefore the ecology approach has been adopted for the project to map socially networked worlds of musical actors, producers, institutions and intermediaries in relation to their environment.

The afternoon sessions were devoted to the international concert and touring business. The first keynote speaker, Berthold Seliger, who is running a concert agency in Berlin, talked about “Empire Business or Cultural Diversity. About the Reality of the Concert Business”. He told, therefore, the history how Live Nation and CTS Eventim emerged and have become oligopolistic and powerful players in the international concert promotion and ticketing business. Berthold Seliger provided a very critical view on the current live music business that is controlled by a few dominant market players driving out independent promotors from the marketplace and, thus, decreasing cultural diversity in the concert market.

After the panel discussion, the former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner(Sincere Management, London, UK), who is a trained economist teaching music management at several universities was awarded the first Honorary Member of the International Music Business Research Association (IMBRA).

YOUNG SCHOLARS’ WORKSHOP ON SEPTEMBER 12^th

In the Young Scholars’ Workshop graduate and PhD students from the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain presented their research results to a group of highly regarded music business/industry researchers on September 12, 2018.

CONFERENCE TRACK DAY ON SEPTEMBER 13^th