How do you solve a problem like the music industry?

Brainchild of Oli Wilson - son of Factory Records founder and Hacienda owner Tony Wilson, Beyond the Music is a conference and grassroots festival held in Manchester in the north west of England. Now in its second year, the conference took place at the start of October, with panels filling the new and audacious Aviva Studios. Across town, in the city’s iconic Northern Quarter 13 venues across three nights saw dozens of grassroots artists perform in an unabashed celebration of music from Manchester and beyond.

With panels on AI, mental health, the economics of the music industry, and keynotes from Aitch, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham Beyond the Music was an ambitious and expansive attempt to grapple with some of the biggest issues facing the music industry today. On the first day of the conference we sat down with Oli Wilson to ask him more about the event.

What brought Beyond the Music together?

The music industry is in a great period of flux and change at the moment due to a number of things. In part due to Brexit and Covid, which had a massive impact on the industry, we had to rally around and pick ourselves up after those crises. The industry has historically done really, really bad with keeping up with progress so it was really important that we brought people together in the same room to have those conversations.

Beyond Brexit and Covid what are the other big issues facing the industry at the moment?

At the moment the whole industry is based on a broken legacy model. Basically, the economics of the music industry doesn’t work at all. All the money and wealth and power are in one place, there needs to be investment down to the grassroots, both in terms of venues and in terms of artists and talent pipeline. The globalised model of the music industry does not work for artists and it does not work for audiences, it just works for a small amount of people.

It’s heartbreaking to see because I work with loads of artists and have many friends that are artists that put their heart and soul into their art and they’re releasing it and just getting nothing back at the moment. They’re just releasing in to this void because the legacy model doesn’t work, but the next big thing we’re waiting for isn’t quite here yet. 140,000 tracks are released every day so it’s really hard for new artists to get heard, for major record labels to find them and then invest in them, particularly because there’s less budgets around.

Corporations are, of course, because of their size, much slower to act in and turn around and they make a lot of their money now on catalogue sales and rather than breaking new talent so there’s lots of big issues to grapple with!

The conference itself has panels on lots of the biggest issues facing the industry at the moment, including AI. How much of a threat do you think it is to the industry?

Artificial intelligence is the great existential threat to the music industry at the moment and could wipe out hundreds of thousands of careers. It needs to be understood and it needs to be harnessed in the right way. I think there’s massive upside potential to it. Let’s not forget, AI is a way of processing mass amounts of data and that data comes from us. It’s not like some alien that’s come from space, it’s actually still based on human foundation. So I believe we have the power to harness it.

How do you think the conversations you will have at the conference will help shape that?

Well, I think it's about who you put around the table. We need regulation, we need all different areas of the industry to come together with some kind of commonality. I think an open conversation is really important and then having the right people in that conversation to lead on to things. We have [Culture Secretary] Lisa Nandy here on Friday. That’s someone that you want to be part of these conversations because the government have a big role to play in legislating for AI.

The last government did not legislate on this matter, nor did they implement the Culture Committee’s recommendations around a voluntary live music levy. Across the week you have politicians here from both local and national level - what would you like to see from them?

I want to see them take the grassroots levy further. It’s brilliant, to take a levy off of the live industry to support grassroots venues and artists but why not the whole music industry? Why is this not applied to major record labels? Major publishing companies? Et cetera? Everyone that is a part of the music industry would be paying a grassroots levy.

My message to the people in power is to go further. Make it cross-sector. Over the next couple of days we’ll be saying that to Lisa Nandy and to [Mayor of Greater Manchester] Andy Burnham. Andy Burnham’s already behind us on this and he was instrumental in the football levy, getting the Premier League to pay down into the grassroots. We need something like that across the industry and the limit of it shows part of the problem with how people view things in silos. They see problems with grassroots venues. Problems with mental health. Problems with a different thing. It’s all one and the same and it needs to be seen as such. It’s all one big industry, so we need to go further.

You have panels on mental health in the industry. How important is it to start having those conversations and how integral are the artists to those conversations?

It's massively important to start these conversations about mental health because it's accepted that you're gonna have bad mental health in the music industry. The music industry is unregulated. There's no HR department in the music industry. So if you're on tour with a crew or a band and there are things going on, you know, who do you talk to?

How do you get out? How do you right that situation? I was working in the music industry in London in my twenties, and I've seen the bad side of it. So one of my personal missions is to set that right.

If we're talking about accessibility to the music industry and let's make it mentally accessible to people, you know, there's no point being accessible if you're gonna treat people like a piece of shit when you get in there. So often things are kept under wraps because people don't want to lose their job. So I think it's really important to have these conversations because otherwise they're not being spoken about openly.

Alongside the conference you’ve taken over a number of venues across Manchester, talk to me about how integral the platforming of these different grassroots acts is to the success of the conference?

I think it's really important. As I said we've gone through this whole globalisation process, which has really removed and separated us from music and I and I think that what people want is that human touch again. They want that connection. So that’s what we’re doing! We have 13 venues, all within half square mile of each other. It's a really unique opportunity to get to loads of shows really quickly. And I think the artists need it because there's just not the platform there for artists that perhaps there once was.

Speaking from a Manchester perspective there's more music in the than there ever has been in its entire history. We have an open submission process to play at Beyond the Music and we've had over 3000 artists try to play this year, and the quality of music is just unreal.

We have complete faith and belief in the artist that we put on, that they can deliver the goods and deliver the quality for the punters going to the festival. I can guarantee it's gonna be better than going to see Oasis at one of their big shows.

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