Music Victoria Update: Q&A with CEO Patrick Donovan

Music Victoria’s CEO Patrick Donovan doesn’t stop. Following a momentous 2014 which saw the introduction of law reforms Agent of Change, Live Music Census and theWhite Paper (which lead to the new State Government’s $22m Music Works package) and the release of the Council’s Music Strategy 2014-17, the non-profit advocate for the Victorian music community has piqued the interest of overseas music cities.

In May, Donovan will speak at the inaugural Music Cities Convention in the UK that will open the Great Escape Music Conference, and this month he launched the annual Membership Drive which offers Music Victoria members a helpful perks for as little as $33pa.

Chatting to TMN, Donovan offers an update on Australia’s music capital, the reforms Music Victoria will lobby for following the budget announce, the 10th anniversary of The Age Music Victoria Awards and how the council in Toronto, Canada inspired Donovan in his continuing efforts to protect live venues.

The deal with AMIN and Travel Beyond ties in well to the Membership Drive…

We gave all of the major entertainment and travel companies the opportunity to compete to supply a partnership (at the end of last year) and it took a while but we certainly wanted to increase our value propositions for our members so we were very keen to launch it in time for our Membership Drive.

I was at the APRA Awards and everyone was talking about it, I’m absolutely thrilled. A lot of what we do is research and advocacy and changing laws, I think for musicians day-to-day, they’re thinking about the hip pocket nerve and they want to save money.

I’ve been Chair of AMIN for just a couple of months now so I wanted to make a bit of a splash. I even thought after wenegotiated the excess baggage deal four years ago with Virgin Australia that we could do some more collective bargaining. The states don’t compete, every band wants to tour every state and by benefitting each state and territory it’s benefitting Victoria as well.

Music Victoria helped develop the State Government’s new $22 million Music Works package;were most of the initiatives and projects in that package ideas of Music Victoria?

There was a lot of consistencies between our official paper and what they came out with. The coalition came out with a smaller package so fortunately for the music industry, Labor won power.

We called for a lot of the things that ended up in the Labor Government’s Policy. We were very organised, we consulted the industry and we put the recommendations to the Liberal State Government and Labor in March, so eight months before the election. That gave them no excuse not to come up with a good package. Labor did and they won power so we’re very excited about that money and those programs being delivered and us having a major role in how they are delivered.

With the Coalition State Government over the last four years, we presented them with our earlier paper which was the case for regulatory reform, and they formed the Live Music Round Table to deal with all the issues in our last paper. Coalition governments are more likely to focus on reform and cutting red tape to make it easier to do business, rather than handing out lots of grants; they might see them as subsidies, we see grants as investments. That worked out quite well because the coalition government made all these reforms and cut all this red tape, and then Labor came in with the big bucks.

Which part of Music Works will be the first thing to roll out?

I believe it will be the artist grants. The money will go through on the budget and the first thing they’ll do is set up the criteria, the last thing will probably be the Music Market, the Hub, because a lot of Music Hubs and Hall of Fames are fabled around the world so they really need to get that right.

We ran a feature last year which outlined all the great things the Victorian Government and Music Victoria are doing, like the Agent of Change Principle, Live Music Census and White Paper. What else is in the works?

Firstly, we’re in a situation where we’ve been told that we’ll have guaranteed funding for the next two years. Even with all we achieved last year we were still fighting for our survival. We won’t know until the budget, but if we know that we’ve got funding from the government then we can stop wasting time chasing money and start implementing plans. While we wait for the government to announce how they’re going to deliver the Music Works package we’ve written our new strategic plan, we’ve hired new staff and found a new home so we’re in a situation where we’re setting ourselves up until we’re ready to go.

It’s also the 10th anniversary of The Age Music Victoria Awards in November. We’ll announce it on the 4th of May that in November we’ll host one of the biggest concerts in Victoria, we’re backing ten of the biggest icons in Victoria music history and they’ll be involved in the concert.

The last four years have focused so much on venues, the laws needed fixing and now they’ve been fixed we really want to turn our attention back to artists. We surveyed all our members last year and they told us some of the areas they wanted us to negotiate better deals for them. Now we’ve done this travel deal we’ll be looking at insurance and some other campaigns.

We’re also waiting to see what help the State government might need in delivering [the Music Works] package because you can’t just hand out grants willy nilly to applicants, you need a strategy around mentoring, regional and export. We’re also writing a good practise guide for musicians; we’ve written one for venues. We’re just waiting to see what areas there needs to be a bit of strategy in and we’ll be ready to move with that and see whether we might actually run some of those ourselves.

You’re speaking at the Music Cities Convention in May, which case studies will you be presenting?

I’m presenting a case study on Melbourne and the reform we achieved last year with the Agent of Change at the music symposium at The Great Escape. That’s exciting because you can’t buy that kind of publicity, ultimately we’re trying to say Melbourne and Victoria’s open for business and encourage people to come and have a look at our music scene and check out our bands. That can lead to audience development and a bigger pool of money for artists.

What we did achieve last year has registered on the international circuit. We’ve had a lot of calls from big cities asking us to try and give them some advice on building other cities.

Are you looking at building sister city relationships overseas?

We don’t just want to partner up with one city because there’s a lot of cities who share best practise and a lot of those cities have a council that appoints a Music Officer –you have that in Austin and Seattle, in Toronto. So local government needs to start acknowledging that music is a huge economic driver and have someone work across a whole lot of areas to protect that, such as planning law and liquor licensing and tourism, there’s so many different areas that music crosses over.

What we’re looking at is building a relationship with a network of cities around the world where we can share ideas the way that AMIN works really well across the country.

For instance we were inspired by NSW which conceptually applied for a variation in the building code to stop discriminating against live music venues. We were successful in lobbying our government for an exemption and now South Australia is looking at NSW and Victoria. Eventually they’ll probably just have a national variation in the building code. So we’ve been inspiring each other and now we’re looking overseas. Some cities want to know how we brought in Agent of Change to protect venues from development and in Toronto the council has the power to announce a historical designation which basically means the council and acquire a venue from a developer. So I’m going over there to meet with them to talk about how that happened. What we have in Victoria is we can protect venues from new development yet if we have a land lord that wants to knock down a venue to build apartments, we have no control over that, like The Palace.

Music Canada is writing a paper featuring 20 different music cities from around the world. That’s going to be released at MIDEM in Cannes in June. That will be the latest best practise for music cities.

‘Music cities’ is a bit of a buzz word at the moment and it’s great because it encourages council to put resources into contemporary music.

How does Melbourne stack up against the other music cities?

It’s hard to say what’s a great music city and who’s ahead of you. Number one, I think you need a great number of venues. Who’s ahead of us? Well, Austin was the first city council to really support its music industry.That was quite contagious,they have loading zones just for musicians. But then Austin only has 100 venues and it has upwards of a million people; we’ve got 3.5 million people and 500 venues.

Music Victoria’s Membership Drive runs until Thursday, April 2. Check out all the details and sign up atwww.musicvictoria.com.au

Australian Music Industry Network members receive:
• Discounts on all Virgin Australia fare classes between 7% – 20%
• Excess Baggage allowances with Virgin Australia and QANTAS (continued)
• Discounted rates and reduced excess on car hire
• Multiple drivers, flexible driver age below 25 (over the age of 21 and full licence required)
• Online portal to book hotels and apartments at best rate including Quest, Mantra, Oaks, Accor, IHG, Starwood, Crown and other boutique properties both in Australia and internationally.