Council pushes for music census every five years, with data to publish on city portal

Data from the most recent census of the Austin music ecosystem will be posted on the city’s open data portal, along with data from the applicant pool for the first-ever cohort of the new Live Music Fund.

Last week, City Council passed a resolution accepting the study from Sound Music Cities that surveyed more than 2,200 musicians and music industry professionals about the economic and cultural dynamics facing musicians in Austin.

That resolution also directed city staff to plan on conducting a similar census every five years to better gauge patterns in how local and state policies are working to keep musicians and other creatives from being priced out of the city.

The resolution was in part a response to staff in the Economic Development Department who said that because they had not commissioned the census, it would go against city norms to host third-party data on the city portal.

That position came after the Music Commission voted last fall to have the data made available on the portal for possible use by outside researchers or organizations involved in music-related programs. Commission members doubled down on that request last month, prompting Council Member Ryan Alter to lead the resolution that was passed on the consent agenda.

The 2022 census found a variety of challenges for local musicians, with only 64 percent of respondents feeling sure they will stay in Austin over the next three years. Just 35 percent of creatives said they are playing more than three shows per month currently, and 20 percent of venue operators and concert presenters rank property taxes as their biggest business challenge.

Nagavalli Medicharla, chair of the Music Commission and a leader of the EQ Austin nonprofit that helped promote the census, said hosting the data and initial analysis from Sound Music Cities via the city’s web resources will make it easier for outside groups to examine the state of the music industry in one of the most well-known music hubs in the U.S.

“There are already some active conversations going on, and we would definitely be interested in working with some groups that are capable of doing next-level analysis on presenting this data,” she said. “Giving them good data essentially helps them to make decisions, whether it’s policy decisions or a nonprofit trying to build a program based on this data.”

The last music census, conducted in 2014 and published with in-depth analysis in 2015, found that nearly a third of local musicians earned less than $15,000 per year.

Medicharla said moving to a five-year interval will help local elected officials and nonprofit leaders make better policy decisions.

“With how dynamically our city is changing, five years seems like a good interval to me. There is also the fact that we are just about to have the first-time rollout of the Live Music Fund, so it would be good to get broad feedback and a health check of the industry and our community members,” she said.

“If we wait for a decade, then it just gets too long to be able to get feedback and react to change. The idea really, in my mind, is to find ways to institutionalize these things within (the Economic Development Department) or other professional music industry entities who have the capacity or the knowledge to do this kind of work.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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