The business of being in the music business
This article was written for the Kāpiti Business Chamber magazine in March 2025 with the intention of highlighting the gap between The Arts and the business community. This gap is not always present — particularly for businesses that operate within The Arts or on the fringe of the industry. However it has become a bit frustrating hearing phrases like ‘art is just fluffy stuff’ being shared around the community, as if to suggest that art doesn’t matter, that it’s superfluous to our livelihoods, and therefore that it does not deserve to be valued.
The purpose of this article is to try and illustrate, for anyone who may be unsure, that The Arts is part of the human experience — whether we like it or not. And if we were to lean into it a little more, and allow ourselves to be a bit more open-minded, then we might even enjoy it, or learn something from it.
Around the time I left school, with a burning desire to make music and be an artist, I was fielding all sorts of warnings – from teachers, my parents, and others around me – to not follow a career path in music or The Arts. “There’s no money in it. It’ll be a struggle. You need to get a real job.”
In some ways this is good advice; protecting an innocent young mind from the absolute grind that making a living from The Arts is in this country. But now with 20 years’ experience since that time, including within the music industry, in ‘real jobs’ and just generally out in the big wide world, I find myself eager to shift this mindset to create change. Our default should not be to warn people of a career within an industry that is so necessary for human existence.
Many wonderful minds are working on this exact conundrum in this country, and indeed around the world, but it’s probably fair to say that the concept hasn’t landed in a way that society seems to have accepted yet.
The Arts is still the outlier, the dark horse, the undervalued asset and therefore the (gulp), ‘nice to have.’
And that’s where I believe the issue lies. The Arts is seen as an optional extra, and yet I would argue that most of the time it’s the very thing that helps make our existence enjoyable.
The Arts is an umbrella term for practices or physical things that are executed by humans with skill, creativity, imagination and emotional connection across cultures and history. It covers a lot of things that everyday humans use and enjoy in their everyday lives. I don’t mean for this broad term to pigeonhole anyone or any practice, but what I want to ensure is that we all understand that The Arts is therefore the term that encompasses things that we all consume – visually, audibly and tangibly. It’s the things that help us process thoughts, emotions and interpersonal relationships, even if we don’t realise it.
You don’t have to be a lover of theatre or galleries to benefit and appreciate The Arts. It’s an aspect of our society that affects us all, and yet The Arts is chronically underfunded, and undervalued within our lives. Imagine a world without music, films, books, posters, inviting eateries, murals, sculptures, landscaped parks and gardens, and the rest. Our surroundings would be bleak, and our interactions would lack emotion and insight. Have you noticed that lots of these things are things that we subconsciously move through life and complacently enjoy?
My particular area of focus, and my specialty, is music. And in 2022, after more than a decade of experience as a performing musician with an interest in music events in Kāpiti, and with the help of my creative and musical partner Cam, we created Mostly Music.
We thought it would be a helpful thing to collate all the gigs advertised around town into one place so that everyone could see what live music events were happening, where. That was really the start of Mostly Music, and our gig guide has been published every week since. What has been surprising is the number of people who visit the website each week to see what’s on, because contrary to what I had expected, they’re not mostly from Kāpiti. In fact 70% of the website traffic is from regions outside of Kāpiti and Horowhenua. This of course suggests that people are looking for music events happening in Kāpiti, and probably using these events as a reason to come to Kāpiti and spend money.
Music, much like other things created under The Arts umbrella, is created through human emotion, and consumed in a similar way. It affects our mindset and our emotional state. It relaxes us, helps us process emotions, and is great for taking the awkward factor out of certain social situations.
But something doesn’t add up. The visitor numbers and the feedback we receive tell us that music is very much a valued part of the human experience: a planned night out to dance up a storm, or a spontaneous trip to a local bar while music plays in the background, creating the vibe. However, we have been conditioned to expect the music for free, or at a price that is not able to support someone following a musical career path.
My hope is that by helping to shine a spotlight on the busyness of our Arts economy here in Kāpiti that we can collectively realise and understand that we can’t expect it without supporting it. We wouldn’t ever expect to eat or drink for free at a hospitality establishment, so why should we expect that the entertainment would be free? I am not trying to assert that The Arts is more important than any other element of a wholesome human experience, but I think we’ve lost our way a bit.
Without humans following a career path in music, there is no soundtrack to ornament and enrich our lives. So I want to put this to everyone: please don’t take The Arts for granted. Because without the things that so often are referred to as ‘the fluffy stuff’, what would we be left with? Roads, sturdy water pipes and a great big sea wall? Yes, they’re important too. But let me also ask you this: what album are you putting on first when it’s time to sit and reflect on the life you’ve lived?