Musical Space 11/29: Art Imitates Government

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KMUW / Mark Foley

This week on Musical Space Mark Foley wonders about the role government might play in music.

From a business standpoint music is incredibly efficient. Musicians don’t need a lot of start-up capital, distribution is nearly free and instantaneous, we don’t deplete a lot of our natural resources, we don’t pollute too much and our carbon footprint is pretty small. Maybe more importantly, we are exporters. So, unlike with much of our country’s international businesses, music helps alleviate our foreign trade gap.

So what if the government subsidized the music industry the same way it does oil, agriculture, and banking? Our legislators, realizing the economic necessity of a healthy music industry, would institute loans, grants, and price guarantees for musicians. Our strategic musical infrastructure would become a concern of national security and our newly-appointed secretary of music.

Pundits would bemoan the fact that our students don’t measure up the the musical aptitude of those in Asian countries. A “No Musician Left Behind” program would be instituted to make sure that anybody who plays banjo, bassoon, or bass guitar would all have the opportunity to succeed. The FDA would establish a minimum daily requirement for music while record companies vie for multi-billion-dollar government music procurement deals.

It wouldn’t work, of course. Politics would get in the way. The lefties would somehow make listening to Joan Baez mandatory. And the right-wing would use the threat of a foreign musical escalation as an excuse for overseas deployment of bands and orchestras. The powerful music lobby would use its influence to make the price of recordings artificially low, inviting trade wars and sanctions. Ultimately, the musical-industrial complex would be deemed “too big to fail”; and when we ran into trouble, congress would have to save musicians with a huge bail-out.

OK, this fantasy got weird. But wouldn’t it be great just once to witness a politician being accused of pandering to an artist?