What Music People Actually Ask For

Hint: it’s not just money.

When civic leaders ask us what the music community in their city needs, the default assumption is usually grants. More money. Bigger checks. And to be clear: reliable income is the #1 response when we ask music people what would most help their work. The economic pressure is real and we shouldn’t pretend it isn’t.

But the second answer surprises people. Across nearly every music census we’ve run, networking and meaningful industry connections come in at #2 – sometimes within a few points of income. In one of our latest cities (can’t name them yet report comes out next month), 65% of respondents named reliable income as the highest-impact support; 54% named networking and industry connections. That gap is narrower than most policy strategies assume.

Here’s the deeper pattern: when respondents name what’s limiting their ability to build a sustainable music career or business, the answer is almost never “I don’t make enough music.” It’s almost always something to do with infrastructure – community and collaboration opportunities, access to services and resources, mentorship, education, peer networks.

Three words show up in nearly every report’s verbatim comments:

• Silos

• Fragmentation

• Gatekeeping

“The talent is here. The people are here. We just don’t know each other.” We have heard numerous versions of that sentence in every community we’ve studied, in every region of the country, at every market size. It comes as often from venue operators and industry professionals as it does from creatives.

What that means in practice: writing a check, by itself, doesn’t fix what music people say is actually broken. The check helps the immediate financial pressure. The check doesn’t introduce the songwriter to the booking agent, the producer to the synch licensor, the small venue to the audience development resource.

The interventions music people ask for, that don’t show up as grant lines… include:

• Place to connect with industry services. Where do I find a manager, a publicist, a booking agent, a synch agent in my own city? Most respondents can’t easily answer that question even when those services exist locally.

• Place to collaborate musically. Rehearsal space. Co-writing rooms. Studio time. Producer-to-artist matchmaking.

• Connections to other creative industries. Film, video, gaming, design. Music revenue increasingly comes from sync and crossover work, not record sales, and most music people have no idea how to access those adjacent industries.

• Both virtual and in-person community networking. Slack groups, monthly meetups, peer learning cohorts. Inexpensive to host. Hard to sustain without someone owning it.

• Mentorship. Especially across the experience gap (more on that in a separate post).

• Music industry training. Not entry-level “what is a publishing royalty” content, career-stage content for working professionals.

None of those require million-dollar grants. Most require coordination rather than capital. Which is why the music commission / community-based collaborative conversation matters more than the grant pool conversation in a lot of cities.

What’s interesting about that conversation is that communities don’t agree on the form. Cleveland’s census found 76% support for a formal music commission, the highest endorsement of a top-down body we’ve measured. Greensboro went the other direction: 64% of respondents there preferred a community-based collaborative approach over a city-affiliated commission. Lafayette landed at 52% for community-based; Northeast Tennessee at 59%. Both forms are valid. The right one depends on local culture, civic appetite, and existing relationships.

The communities making real progress on the connection problem are the ones that picked a form (commission, collaborative, network, nonprofit, council) and started convening. Recurring meetups. Mixer events. Cross-sector breakfasts. Peer learning groups. Public-facing directories of who does what locally.

Cash matters. We’re not arguing otherwise. But after more than two dozen music censuses, I’m increasingly convinced that the biggest underutilized resource in most music ecosystems isn’t money – it’s the social and professional capital sitting in the same city, not connected to itself.

Connection doesn’t show up as a budget line. It shows up as relationships that lead to gigs, collaborations, contracts, and careers. The infrastructure to enable it costs less than most cities spend on a single festival.

If your music community is asking for connection, it’s not a soft ask. It’s the structural one.