“There is a huge amount of value in the work that musicians do”

What Steven asked Janet Fischer, Chief Executive of Live Music Now and co-Chair of the Intra Community Trust.

As part of our seemingly ongoing North American series, Steven sat down with Canada’s Janet Fischer, Chief Executive of Live Music Now and co-Chair of the Intra Community Trust. They met at No.64 in Intra to talk about what brought her to the UK, and ultimately to Medway, the work of the Intra Community Trust, how she came to own a minesweeper, Canadian politics, and lots more.

Janet Fischer. Photo: Mariangela Quiroga.

What is your official occupation?
My official occupation is Chief Executive of Live Music Now.

What is Live Music Now?
Live Music Now is a national music and social impact organisation. We were founded in 1977 by Yehudi Menuhin because he played a number of concerts with the composer Benjamin Britten after the Korean War for returning prisoners of war. He said that they are the most impactful concerts he'd ever done, and he saw an opportunity for emerging musicians to be able to build their performance skills and have more opportunities and do that alongside supporting people who didn't have access to music. Fast forward about 47 years, and we now cover all genres of music. We have about 350 professional musicians across England, Northern Ireland, Wales and a sister organisation in Scotland, Live Music Now Scotland, and an alliance of Live Music Now organisations across Europe. We've got musicians working in about 20% of the special schools in the UK. They're supporting teaching staff with using music as part of their day-to-day education and supporting children in those schools. We work in autism resource spaces, supporting kids with an autism diagnosis within mainstream schooling, all the way through to our work in health, where we're working with mothers who are experiencing perinatal mental health issues on our lullaby program all the way through to performances in hospitals, in wards, in ICU. Lots of community programs.
We've got a great one running in Medway called Songs & Scones that's been running about three years now in Chatham Library, and that's a dignity-focused approach to getting people to connect with one another. There's an opportunity to meet other people, there's great music, there's a cup of tea, there's a scone, there's a warm space, there's an opportunity to connect with the library team, and they happen every month. Our work is really around heritage and specific issues locally. We have two specialist areas that were two priority areas. One is Northern Ireland and the other is Medway.
Medway is about all life courses. We're looking at can we bring national organisational resource from a national scale organisation into the mix locally with musicians locally? How can we embed musicians in communities? How do they become a part of that fabric? How do we support community or other community organisations locally? How do we use music to open up the heritage space? Maybe bring voices that aren't heard in other spaces. A big piece of work that we did with Historic England was working with disabled children and young people on what they were proud of in their high streets. The kids we're working with can't physically even get to their high street. How do you actually pull the things that are in the fabric of a place, and the history and the heritage of a place, into something that works for a much wider group of people and across those spaces? That’s Live Music Now in a very short nutshell.

How did you get involved with them?
I came to Live Music Now in 2021. I've been in post four years now. I was recruited by the board. Our chair is Sir Vernon Ellis. He replaced our founder chair, Sir Ian Stoutzker. Our previous executive director stood down, and they did an open call. For me, it was really interesting because I was a professional musician, and I performed, and I also have an MBA. I did half-and-half performance in business, and I had been working as interim chief executive of a poetry charity called Poet in the City, and I had just finished that contract. Live Music Now came up, and it was the nice symbiosis of all of my things. All of my loves of business and music and making a social impact.

What are your thoughts with regard live music in Medway currently?
Medway is such an interesting place because you have got a huge heritage. You’ve got the Medway Sound, you’ve got Pete Tong, you've got all of this incredible tradition of grassroots music that's come through. You've got a lot of emerging artists locally. It's got such a big trad scene. There's such a huge folk scene in Medway and where it surrounds. But it also has this slight issue in that it's close to London, but it isn't London. For some reason, that little 36-minute train journey feels like a long way. We also don't have an A-class performing venue here, but we've got amazing small venues, like Poco Loco.
There's lots of people supporting music on a grassroots level, but then we're also missing those next-stage venues. There isn't a 400-seat gig venue locally that people can really embrace and drive forward. We've got the Castle Concerts, but they're programming to a very different audience, they're not necessarily focused on local musicians. I think it's quite interesting, because you have a lot of talent locally, and this is a big question we have with Live Music Now. How do we support musicians to stay in the places that they want to live without having to go to major cities? How do you help them build up a portfolio of work that enables them to be financially sustainable?
The reality is that for most gigging musicians in the UK today, the economics just don't stack up. Even if you look at major performing artists, Lily Allen publicly on OnlyFans just to support her tours, and even in major stadium tours, it's not breaking even. That's a problem. It's a big problem because every single person in this country consumes music on a daily basis. We all consume music all the time. It's in the background of our whole lives. We talk about this a lot at Live Music Now. That everybody has a musical identity, that everybody has a soundtrack to their lives that is made up of the songs they heard as a child. The tune you heard outside the pub when you were breaking up with your first partner, the first gig you ever went to with your mates, all of those songs that become part of the tapestry of who you are as a person and your own life. We all have that soundtrack, but there seems to be a dichotomy between our desire to consume music and our desire to have music in our lives and the economic way in which that then gets delivered in terms of streaming rights, in terms of big issues around AI and IP, and how do we make it possible for musicians to build up viable careers? How do we make sure that young musicians, who are in school right now, have access to music lessons, have an ability to make music in a way that is a human right, and also that supports their wider education?
I have a very big soapbox about the payment of musicians. People ask me all the time, “Why don't your musicians volunteer?” That's great. Would you like to volunteer for your job? There is a huge amount of value in the work that musicians do. It should be compensated with value and provide a real outcome. There's compensation that needs to happen for that, and for me, is really important.
It's a big ecosystem issue. The music department at the University of Kent closing, that’s not ideal. Live Music Now is one of the largest employers of musicians in the UK. We have a specialist focus in our recruitment for new musicians coming onto our roster around disabled musicians, who identify as disabled or neurodivergent and musicians with informal roots to the career. We know that if you're in a place that has higher indices of deprivation, from a lower socioeconomic background, it's going to be a lot harder for you to get into those formal roots to music, and universities are one of those pieces. Just because the university music program is going, it doesn't mean that that's the end of music training in that way, and I would hard argue that a vast majority of bands have never made it through a university music program. They made it through the learning program of Poco Loco and a variety of other pubs and establishments.
We do still need some of those formal professional routes for people to go through. I think one of the reasons why we need that is because part of being able to help people see that music and the creative industries is a viable economic pathway for their lives. It's one of the largest industries in the UK, with gross value added to the GB economy of £120bn a year across the creative industries. It's massive. It produces as much economic return for our economy as property development does. And yet we're like, ‘But when are musicians going to get real jobs?’ I'm certain that Ed Sheeran is one of our largest exports. There's value for people and understanding and seeing that creative professions are viable careers that have job pathways, and I see gigging is one thing, but I see also organisations like Live Music Now and using music and the creative arts as a route to supporting social well-being in communities and as supporting cohesion in communities. It's really valuable work.