City seeking to survey music industry professionals

By Josie Abugov
Contributing Writer

(Veritenews.org) — This month, the New Orleans Mayor’s Office of Nighttime Economy is looking for composers, promoters and anyone else with a hand in the city’s music industry to answer some questions about their demographics, experiences within the field, career concerns and suggestions for improving the music ecosystem of the city.

The office opened responses on Friday (May 10) for a “music census” of the greater New Orleans area, an initiative that aims to gather data on the landscape of the local music industry. Musicians and other industry professionals will have until the end of the month to fill out the anonymous survey, and that data will inform future city policies related to the industry.

Howie Kaplan, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Nighttime Economy, said the music census is central to the office’s mission to give culture bearers and industry professionals the opportunity to voice their concerns within the city’s cultural economy landscape.

“This is a more data-driven and concerted outreach to not just deal with the day-to-day, but to deal with ways we can make concrete changes that will continue generationally,” said Kaplan, the city’s colloquial “night mayor.”

The initiative is a partnership between the nighttime economy office and Sound Music Cities, an Austin, Texas-based organization that has led music censuses in cities across the country. New Orleans is part of a cohort of fifteen places, including Nashville, Tennessee and Anchorage, Alaska, that the firm has been working with recently.

Don Pitts, the founder of Sound Music Cities, said that the company aims to collect information about the lived experiences of those in the music industry and present these findings “back to the community in a digestible form.” Because musicians working in the same city can have vastly different perceptions of their local industry, census data can confirm some anecdotal observations while disproving others, Pitts said

In Sacramento, California, for instance, music census findings from last year demonstrated that local artists viewed the city policies as enforcement-oriented rather than collaborative. To address these concerns, the city proposed ordinances to lower permit costs and expedite approval processes, among other changes, Pitts said. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, music census data found that there was a lack of press coverage about the music scene, Pitts added, which led to an effort by journalism students at the University of Tennessee to write about the local industry.

Some of the information that the New Orleans music census will gather includes respondents’ basic demographics, their roles within the music industry, professional experience, financial conditions, plans for relocation and the kinds of work they’ve done outside of the music industry. Based on the responses, Sound Music Cities will then evaluate the city’s music ecosystem on a number of metrics, including livability, culture and belonging, economic activity and music friendly policies. The report analyzing the data is scheduled to be released this summer.

All the responses collected are anonymous, said Pitts, who urged all New Orleanians associated with the music ecosystem to fill out the census. This includes everyone from musicians to venue workers to nightlife service providers.

Ashlye Keaton is the co-founder of The Ella Project, which provides legal and advocacy services for culture bearers in the city. Keaton said she had been pushing the city to implement a music census for years. The last time local or state officials collected comprehensive data on local musicians was fifteen years ago, she said. Now, the report can serve as an updated “barometer of our creative industries,” she said. Keaton said she’s heard anecdotes that musicians and other industry workers are struggling to stay afloat amid soaring costs of living, but substantiating these experiences is difficult without good data.

“What I would like to know is whether musicians can afford to be here,” she said.

This article originally published in the May 13, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.