BIGSOUND: What I learnt… Music true value

This was our second year partnering with BIGSOUND, the southern hemisphere’s largest music conference.

We hosted our own small lunch, attended other lunches and dinners, ran a founder session, programmed four conversations and hosted a builder session.

Listening to the panels, the questions asked, the comments, and having conversations across the week, I realised I’d missed the most important and valuable thing the industry creates. Its true contribution to the world.

In the moment the industry is having right now, there’s a greater need than ever to articulate that value. The choices made now will shape for the next 20 years.  Leaving the current conversation on copyright alone, I started to think about what that value really is.

The music industries sole purpose is to make you feel something: a recorded song, a live song, the strumming of a guitar, a great drum beat.  This is the same as the entire entertainment industry and it’s like no other.

In Lucas Cantor’s conversation with Poppy, he outlined how music has been part of human civilisation for 65,000 years. Our ability to hear and assess sound helped us survive.  It has become how we tell stories, communicate and hold culture.

In our modern world, at the UNIFIED lunch, Push CEO Kate Duncan mentioned how important live music is for young people’s wellbeing and sense of belonging.

From our first peoples to our civilisation today, music has shaped our world.

Now As we look to the future, to a world where there are real concerns about technology shaping who we are. How do we make sure that technology can understand us, connect with us on a human level and build products that can make our lives better. After last week my gut says that will be emotional residue.

Every system we’ve built to value music measures the transaction: the stream, the ticket, the sync. None of them measure what the song leaves behind. If we build the next generation of technology on the same measure, we’ll scale the part that matters least.

When music became a business the framing limited the value it truly creates.  I’ve felt that true value as an artist, a manager and a fan. We’ve just never been able to name it, meaning we’ve never found a way to speak to it and lead to us not being able to value it.

Music soundtracks incredible moments on the sporting field. It gives someone a few minutes of appreciation on the way into work. It welcomes a new life into the world. Yes, all of these moments earn songwriters something, but what about what follows? What about what that moment contributes to the listener’s view of the world, how they live each day and the decisions they make.

The true value of music isn’t the moments it creates.  Those moments mean so much because we know what they give us long term.  Memories, a new perspective, a connection to the rest of society. It’s key to the human experience, it’s emotional residue, it shapes billions of lives and It’s way bigger than we way we currently talk about its value.

So, as we head into a world driven by technology that can’t experience that feeling, how do we make sure the value of what music creates stays central to the human experience?