I tend to assume most organisations in music these days follow some version of a Triple Bottom Line approach, where objectives can be understood as Artistic, Social, and Financial and the wider contribution of the music sector captured in terms of Cultural, Social, and Economic benefits.

The specific balance between the areas of value from which we individually draw our sense of purpose will differ for each of us working in music and may shift from project to project and evolve over time.

Speaking personally, I think my fundamental commitment over the past thirty years or so has been to music as a source of profound subjective experience. As an artist and as a listener I’m most interested in the immediate qualities of whatever particular music is central to a given experience or activity I’m involved with and how my thoughts and feelings are affected. When I hear my son playing guitar around the house, I am glad for him because I think he deserves to spend time doing something he finds intrinsically rewarding and meaningful.

I am confident that music is important in a general sense because I know that other human beings in all sorts of different settings throughout human history have chosen to devote time and energy to it, albeit for all sorts of reasons and purposes. These widely distributed acts of valuation are enough for me to infer, heuristically, that music has value.

Music has lots of different kinds of measurable effects. Many are positive. However, as with other facets of life, they can also be more ambiguous. For instance, participating in music socially can actually jeopardise well-being and personal relationships, and it costs as well as makes people money. I believe we play music because we are human, and music is an aspect of the way we humans relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the universe. Music therefore tends to reflect our own complexity.

I think this warts-and-all understanding of the value of music is problematic from a funding point of view. When competition is as fierce as it is, why would we collectively resource something presented as having inherently uncertain or ambiguous outcomes, versus a project that confidently offers more explicit, defined benefits?

In the current data-driven, and cash-strapped moment it is difficult to justify at a bureaucratic level, that which cannot be easily measured. Subjective aesthetic experience is tricky to communicate and more tricky still to present objectively (which is one of the ways academic disciplines such as musicology and music psychology make such important contributions). Social and economic outcomes are generally a much more straightforward fit for the decision-making processes with which we must all engage.

Successful music projects very often rely on collaboration between people with different fundamental purposes, and intentions. What music actually is for each collaborator, what they each understand music to be, will differ. I’ve indicated above that, for me, music is a subjective experience and an aesthetic object. But it is also, of course, a social act, something we do together. Then, with my record label hat on, considering it as an object again, it is a technical product, comprising sounds, texts, images, and also a legal entity; a bundle of rights. Producers, lawyers, executives, educators, and artists are all likely to bring different perspectives or assumptions depending on their particular background and role.

Perhaps to be sustainable, a music organisation (artist, freelancer, company, non-profit) must find a way to balance its objectives across these three different forms of value: aesthetic, social, and economic. Or, maybe this balance is something that can be achieved across a local scene or regional sector, allowing a greater degree of specialisation and focus for each organisation. If so, this would take a degree of coordination.

_{Written without the use of generative AI tools}