This thought leadership panel was programmed to investigate the progress – or lack of – on race accountability in the music industry since the 2020 BLM protest movement. We also wanted to explore what it means to be ethical, how to take a stand and the greater challenges facing Black artists in 2024…
Amongst all of the valuable knowledge that would help the budding artists and aspiring music industry professionals who attended UD’s Industry Takeover 2024, a heavier conversation was being had on race accountability in the music industry. The PRS-backed POWER UP initiative serves to support Black musicians, creators and industry professionals and address racism and racial disparities in the music industry.
Hosted by Elise Brown, the co-founder and director of Revere Arts, the panel featured POWER UP co-founder Ben Wynter, who also founded Unstoppable Music Group and is the Director of Business Development and Partnerships at the Association of Independent Music (AIM); Komali Scott-Jones, the A&R Director at AWAL and Executive Member at the Black Music Coalition as well as Andrew Ogun who is the agent for change at the Wales Arts Council, who was the main organiser of the Black Lives Matter movement in Newport, Gwent and surrounding areas.
Andrew Ogun on representation
“We have this very, very strong pool of talent, but we don’t have the infrastructure, right? You don’t have the magazines, you don’t have the blog, you don’t have the radio, you know, all these things that wrap the music creation, that make people blow or reach the next stage of their career… We have over saturation on the music creator side, we don’t really have anybody that’s thinking about being executive, but again, that’s because they’ve never seen themselves represented in those fields. They’ve never seen anybody that’s come before them that’s been an executive or a manager. So again, if you can’t see yourself reflecting in something, it’s very hard to see yourself being that thing.”
The panel on the challenges for black artists and creatives
Andrew Ogun: A lot of the significant barrier is bread and access to money and information. I don’t necessarily mean money, just strictly financial, but resources. In Wales, we don’t really have a rich hip-hop or MOBO history, so you can literally trace the journey of, let’s say, a rapper and an indie band both at the exact same point And you’ll see how quickly that indie band rises in comparison to the hip-hop artists with everything the same. And you’ll see how quickly radio picks up on them, because number one, in Wales, they don’t know what to do with the genre, but number two, these bands seem to have access to this resource of money that the kind of MOBO artists don’t seem to have. So I think at a certain level, that lack of resource is something that really begins to hinder people.
Komali Scott-Jones: I actually think it’s money in a different way. I think that lack of it for a lot of the artists that are coming through means that they have to make decisions that other people wouldn’t have to… I think in the short term, it may feel like it benefits them, like taking a big old advance from a record label, for example, which feels great in the moment. It feels like “I can look after my family,” I don’t want to be stereotypical in terms of what they would use for that advance, but a lot of the time it is to get them out of where they are at that current time, which isn’t going to be helpful for their career, right? I think giving a lot of their rights and power away much earlier than other artists have to, means that it’s harder to sustain their business. And I think that’s a massive barrier.
Ben Wynter: I think it’s knowledge and it’s it’s also humility. There’s a generation that aren’t willing to do the work right, and by that, I mean go out and actually understand what it is you need to know. You should go away and actually do the research and understand what things actually are and how things actually work. I think what’s happening now is everyone’s trying to take a shortcut, so they’ll go on Tiktok, “I saw this on Tiktok, that means it’s this. I saw this on Instagram. It means it’s this.” No, most that information is misinformation. And when you work in the business, you kind of see a lot of this stuff. That’s not actually what’s happening, or actually the bigger picture is this.
Komali Scott-Jones on passing on the torch: “You can still lead an amazing career and still uplift and support your community, and I think that’s really commendable. We have to always remember, don’t close that door. You have to bring others through. It’s so important.”
Ben Wynter encouraged the audience to “use [their] blackness as a super power.”
In short, these are the important conversations we need to be having. Music is rooted in Black origin, regardless of genre, and we need to make sure the music industry continues to improve how it treats black artists and industry professionals, including giving them more access to resources, funding and equity.
UD‘s CEO Pamela McCormick has written on this further, highlighting the need for strategic collaboration. Click here to read her opinion piece in the new issue of Music Week.
Words: Kat Friar
Photography: Anthony Wilde + Laura ‘Hyperfrank’ Brosnan.
