Helping our kids find their voice

TASMANIA is leading the way as the first Australian state trialling a new-look national contemporary music industry mentoring program for schools

A new report, Born Global, has taken a close look at how Australian music is performed, streamed, downloaded and published outside Australia. It turns out this export activity is worth about $195 million from international markets each year, $43 million of which is overseas royalty revenue for our songwriters — generated when songs by Australian writers are played outside of Australia. There is clearly a growing global appetite for songs written by Australians because that overseas royalty figure has doubled over the past five years.

While the Born Global research looks at export success from the point of view of artists who write and perform their own songs — think Flume, Courtney Barnett and breakthrough West Australian band, Methyl Ethel — I have been exploring the rising tide of emerging Australian creatives getting a piece of the export action behind the scenes, writing songs for other people.

These include 27-year-old ex-Idol, Hayley Warner, who has been an in-demand songwriting collaborator since basing herself in LA six years ago and has just had a careerblasting high with Katy Perry’s new hit single, Never Really Over; US-based Sarah Aarons, 25, who has written Billboardcharting, platinum-selling hits for Zedd and John Legend and is a Grammy nominee; and 24year-old Chloe Papandrea, who co-writes for others as a

Tina Broad

side hustle to her career as the recording artist, CXLOE.

These writers are part of a tradition of “backroom” songwriters working in teams to create songs for prominent artists that goes as far back as Tin Pan Alley in the early 1900s. It’s even more prevalent as the model for writing hits these days, with a US study finding it takes an average of 4.53 songwriters to create a global hit single.

A fascinating insight from the Born Global research into Australia’s export-performing artists that dovetails with my own study into our behindthe-scenes songwriters is that, while it demands sophisticated entrepreneurial, technical and social skills, often current success is not built on formal music qualifications. Of the 24 artists represented in Born Global, only three had pursued formal music or productionrelated training after school. The rest had either no postschool formal qualification at all, or it was in something other than music. All the backroom writers at the heart of my study made decisions to bypass tertiary training in music after school too.

That means secondary school is the launchpad into the industry for many of our top artists and songwriters and their last touchpoint for formal music education. This is important, because there’s evidence that a nation’s system of music education has an impact on music export success, with Sweden a salutary example. Sweden’s dominance as a songwriting superpower has been emphatic over the last few decades, partly attributable to the role model factor of its high-profile songwriting successes such as backroom writer/producer, Max Martin (whose hit-making record is surpassed only by Lennon and McCartney). Another attributing factor is Sweden’s tradition of state-funded school music education and its network of municipal music schools that provides training in things like beat-making, songwriting and producing.

Compared to Sweden, Australia has a relative lack of training for the school-aged songwriter, particularly in contemporary practices such as team writing and the use of technology to create music (like Flume does), not just record it. Australia’s national music organisation, APRA AMCOS, is trying to change that.

Since 2014 we have been running a music industry mentoring program, SongMakers, where highprofile musos work with students in schools to model real-world songwriting and producing. This year, the Tasmanian Department of Education has come on board to help us trial innovations to the program. We are bringing students from different schools together in hothouse writing camps based in host schools with established

contemporary music programs, such as Hobart’s Claremont College. We are also mentoring teachers and creating networks that connect them with industry support to help make their classroom experiences even more authentic for their students. The new-look program is designed to broaden students’ so-called soft skills in things like collaboration, critical thinking and communication while also opening their eyes to career possibilities in the contemporary music industry, including in songwriting and producing.

So how does a would-be songwriter make the leap from school to work and what skills do they need to get in on the international action?

Award-winning songwriter and Potbelleez frontman, Ilan Kidron, is a SongMakers industry mentor.

“We try to get across that you have to develop a particular set of skills if you’re a career writer,” Kidron says. “You’ve got to be creative; able to work well with others; be resilient when disappointments come up; have a good understanding of the online world; have a working knowledge of industry-standard software like ProTools or Logic; and hone business skills like international marketing and accounting. And you have to be able to do all that wherever you find yourself because there’s no workplace in the traditional sense. How many jobs demand that? It’s scary and hard but it’s also really, really exciting.”

Tina Broad started Australia’s biggest school music initiative, Music: Count Us In and won the International Music Council’s Musical Rights Award in 2011. She runs APRA AMCOS’s SongMakers program and is researching the career paths of emerging Australian songwriters as part of her PhD studies.