This word ‘smart’ is mentioned in reference to cities a lot. There are endless conferences and trade fairs exploring ‘smart cities’ or ‘Internet of things’ technologies. Most cities now have tech weeks – and the term is now so regarded that it’s often capitalised as ‘SMART’. But spending time in this world, hearing from the many mayors at the many conferences, you start to wonder who these solutions are being tailored for, and what aspects of city life are they ignoring, often unintentionally.Take music, arts and culture, for example. At the world’s largest smart cities event, Barcelona’s Smart Cities Expo, there’s little mention of it. And if smart cities technology is being deployed to change how we experience life in our cities, than we must think about these implications.
There are hundreds of tech- and application-based solutions to problems in music’s value chain, from getting it to our eyes and ears, to ensuring artists are paid for the work they create. Some are mainstream, such as accepting that every song ever written is available on your phone through Spotify or Tidal. Some are less front-facing, including solutions for how royalties are distributed – the micro-penny economy that converts the playing of a song into money for the songwriter and performers.
But where are the technologies that can bring music into communities more – or make local governments more accountable for supporting, sustaining and developing music and cultural ecosystems? Is there an app to assess or measure one’s music policy, or a piece of kit that helps create one in the first place? Can we develop better thinking to prioritize the value of what happens inside a building, rather than simply calculating the value on the land itself?
