Collective Responsibilities: The Arts Council, Community Arts and the Music Industry in Ireland

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with how various forms and practices of popular music are addressed and represented within agendas for the arts and in the development of cultural policy. Discussion will centre on the funding policies of the Arts Council of Ireland, the largest funding body for the arts within the Republic. Using the Arts Council as an example, the chapter will discuss how popular music is valued and supported by funding bodies and how views of the music industry are built into institutional understandings of popular music practice. The intention is to question the way in which the music industry is popularly defined as a self-sustaining economy. Specific reference will be made to grassroots initiatives aimed at supporting popular music in Ireland and to the relationship that community-based groups have with policy-makers, the Arts Council and the music industry. We argue that the questions thrown up by the issue of grant funding for popular music highlight broader debates between different arts organisations over what the ‘use value’ of the arts can or should be. Popular music will be used to examine the tensions between the ‘fine arts’, ‘cultural industries’ and ‘community arts’ models that were central to the debates around cultural policy in the second half of the twentieth century. The research for the chapter was conducted in Dublin as part of a European-funded project that mapped and assessed support for small businesses working within the music industry in the city. What became apparent during this research was that any satisfactory understanding of ‘support’ required the examination of the activities of a complex patchwork of organisations and institutions. These latter included national government, education and training institutions, general business support agencies, the unemployment agency and arts funding bodies. In fact, many of the major sources of support originated in non-sector-specific institutions that were seemingly unrelated to ‘the music industry’. Moreover, we encountered a wide range of practitioners who were deeply involved with popular music in their everyday working lives but did not necessarily conform to commonsense notions of ‘music industry workers’. The sheer variety of individuals and organisations that we came across raised the inevitable question of how the ‘music industry’ should be defined: whom does it include and whom does it exclude?