The Bureaucrats of the Backstage
By Stevie Connor | The Sound Café Journal
Editor’s Note: This is Part Three of a three-part investigative special report by Stevie Connor examining the state of the live music ecosystem. Continue reading Part One: "The Long Road To The Next Gig" HERE and Part Two: "The Safety Trap" HERE
When Cultural Decisions Drift Away From the Music
There was a time when walking into a venue’s back office, or speaking with the individuals steering a cultural institution, often meant talking to someone who knew the smell of damp guitar cases, the sting of a blown tube amplifier, and the unspoken weight of writing a three-minute song that actually meant something.
That did not necessarily mean everyone involved was a musician, but there was usually a degree of cultural familiarity: an understanding of the rooms, the artists, the audiences and the peculiar economics that have always surrounded live music.
Today, you may be just as likely to encounter an operations spreadsheet, a corporate risk-mitigation checklist, or a professional administrator whose background is in communications, marketing, hospitality, finance or event management.
None of those backgrounds is inherently a problem. A person does not need to have stood on a stage to understand music, and some of the most committed supporters of artists have never played an instrument professionally. The problem begins when administration becomes detached from culture, and when the people making decisions about music understand the process of managing it better than they understand the thing they are managing.
When those responsible for decisions within live music and its surrounding institutions have little meaningful understanding of the art form, the artists who create it, or the communities that sustain it, the ecosystem can gradually stop functioning as a platform for culture. It becomes a logistical system in which artists are processed, scheduled, measured and assessed according to criteria that may have very little connection to the reasons people make music in the first place.
The Rise of the Administrative Middleman
Modern live music requires administration. Venues have to deal with insurance, licensing, staffing, health and safety, budgets, capacity, marketing, technical requirements and an ever-growing list of practical considerations. Festivals and cultural organizations have even more layers of responsibility. None of this should be dismissed simply because it isn't glamorous. Without good administration, many of the rooms and organizations artists depend upon would not exist.
But somewhere between making a cultural event possible and managing every aspect of it, the artist can disappear inside the paperwork.
A songwriter can begin to look less like a cultural contributor and more like a unit requiring floor space, time allocation, technical support and risk management. A band becomes a booking. A performer becomes a set of deliverables. A festival appearance becomes a line on a schedule. The language may be perfectly reasonable from an operational perspective, but when that becomes the dominant way of understanding the artist, something important is lost.
The issue isn't whether the administrator has ever played guitar, sung into a microphone or stood beneath a lighting rig. The issue is whether they understand what happens within that context. A good administrator can be invaluable to a musician. A good venue manager can keep a room alive through extraordinarily difficult economics. A good festival director can create opportunities that an artist could never create alone. There are non-musicians working throughout the cultural sector who understand artists remarkably well and have spent years advocating for them.
The problem is the opposite situation: when someone responsible for making cultural decisions has little curiosity, interest, or understanding about the culture itself. At that point, music can become something to be managed rather than something to be understood. The artist becomes an operational consideration, the audience becomes a collection of statistics, and the cultural value of the work becomes secondary to the ease with which it can be packaged, measured and explained.
That is where the administrative middleman becomes more than an innocent part of the machinery. The machinery itself begins to determine what gets through it.
Scaling Up: Boards, Awards and Cultural Decision-Making
The administrative disconnect does not stop at the venue door. It can extend into the boardrooms of music societies, cultural organizations, funding bodies, festival programming committees and awards structures. Once again, the issue is not simply whether the people around the table are musicians. Cultural organizations need people with financial expertise, governance experience, legal knowledge, marketing skills and organizational ability. A functioning institution cannot be built entirely from people who have spent their lives on stage.
There is a difference, however, between professional administration and cultural understanding, and that difference becomes particularly important when the people around the table are being asked to make artistic judgments.
I have experienced that distinction personally.
Some years ago, I applied for funding for a cross-cultural concert project presented in Mississauga. The production brought Scottish performers together with a Scots-Canadian singer-songwriter, alongside a special performance by a School of Highland Dance and a Scottish Canadian emcee. The event was deliberately conceived as a musical connection between Scotland and Canada.
We completed the application, answered the questions and addressed the criteria as we understood them. In fact, the first two sentences of the application identified us as Scottish Canadians and explicitly described the project as an effort to promote cross-cultural ties.
We believed we had made the cultural premise of the event about as clear as it could be.
The application was denied.
A few months later, Anne and I happened to meet the non-musician who headed the panel responsible for the funding decisions. We spoke afterwards, and the conversation was revealing. He told us that, had he known we were Scottish Canadians, we would definitely have received the funding.
Anne and I were both present for that conversation.
That statement stayed with me.
The information he said would have changed the decision was not buried somewhere in the application. It was in the first two sentences.
I cannot know precisely why the original application was unsuccessful, and I would not pretend that one conversation explains the entire decision-making process. Funding decisions are complicated, and there may have been factors we never knew about. But I can speak to what Anne and I were told directly, and the experience illustrated something that concerns me about cultural administration: sometimes the people assessing a cultural project can miss the cultural context, even when the applicant has put it directly in front of them.
We didn't receive the funding, but we decided to go ahead anyway. Anne and I put the project together through WeeDan Music and took the financial risk ourselves. When that event took place, the show sold out and brought together the same artists in a production built around the musical and cultural connections between Scotland and Canada.
The story did not end there. Following the performance, Celtic Crossing was nominated for Best Cultural Event at the Canadian Special Events Expo 2013. Contemporary records identify the nomination as a national event-industry recognition, with the winner announced at the Expo 2013 awards ceremony in Toronto.
For us, that recognition was an honour. More than that, though, it provided an interesting postscript to a project that had initially been denied the funding we had sought. The award did not prove that the original funding decision was wrong, nor does the story prove that a non-musician should not lead a funding panel. What it does demonstrate is something more subtle: cultural decisions can be influenced by whether the people assessing a project actually recognize the cultural context being presented to them.
And sometimes the cultural value of a project becomes rather more obvious after the paperwork has already been filed.
A person can be extremely competent at administering a grant program without understanding why a particular traditional musician matters to a community. Someone can be highly accomplished in marketing analytics without understanding why an obscure roots artist with a modest online following may have made a far more significant contribution to a musical tradition than their numbers suggest. Someone can know how to construct a successful event while having little understanding of the cultural ecosystem from which the artists on its stage have emerged.
This is where metrics can become a substitute for judgment. Follower counts, streams, ticket presales, social engagement, projected audience numbers and the strength of a publicity campaign may all provide useful information. None of them, however, can tell the whole story. A song is not necessarily culturally important because an algorithm has rewarded it.
An artist does not necessarily become significant because a marketing campaign has made them visible. And a lifetime spent preserving, developing or passing on a musical tradition cannot always be represented adequately by a spreadsheet.
There is a particular danger when measurable activity becomes confused with cultural value. An institution can begin rewarding what it knows how to count rather than what it actually understands. Polish can start to look like substance, visibility can start to look like influence, and professional networking can start to look like artistic importance. The people making the decisions may not even intend for that to happen. The system simply becomes structured around the things that are easiest to demonstrate.
When Everyone Knows Everyone
There is another side to this argument that I cannot ignore, because I have sat on the other side of the table myself.
I served on a national panel for a Canadian awards program. The Toronto Blues Society's archived material for the Maple Blues Awards lists me as Stevie Connor | The Sound Cafe Magazine | Blues & Roots Radio | Mississauga, ON on its Awards nominating panel.
The 2023 published programme describes that panel as a national group of blues experts, including radio hosts, journalists and festival organizers. It also states that nominees were selected by the panel, while winners in the instrumental categories were determined by experts drawn from that same panel. The broader categories were decided by public voting.
I was therefore not looking at the Canadian blues scene from the outside. I was part of it.
And that creates a problem that is almost the mirror image of the one I have been describing.
If the people making cultural decisions know too little about the culture, they may fail to recognize what matters. But if they know everyone involved in the culture, another danger appears. Familiarity can become influence. Professional relationships can become difficult to separate from judgment. Personal loyalties, friendships, working relationships and long-standing associations can make the distance required for independent assessment much harder to maintain.
This is not an accusation that every decision was improperly made. It is an observation about the structure of a relatively small cultural community. When the same people appear repeatedly in the roles of broadcaster, promoter, organizer, committee member, nominator, judge or gatekeeper, the boundaries between participation and adjudication can become uncomfortably close.
I became uncomfortable enough with my own place within that system that I asked for my name to be removed from the panel.
What happened next was almost as revealing as the reason I asked.
It took approximately two years for my name to disappear from the published panel listings, despite the fact that I was no longer serving as a juror.
I don't make that observation to suggest that every person involved in the awards organization was compromised, or that every decision made by the panel was influenced by personal relationships. I have no basis for making such a sweeping claim. But when I looked at the system from inside it, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the closeness of the relationships involved and with the role I was being asked to play within that machinery.
The problem isn't necessarily that the wrong people are in the room.
Sometimes the problem is that everyone in the room knows someone.
That interconnectedness is not inherently corrupt. In fact, it is one of the things that can make a small cultural community strong. People who spend years supporting a musical tradition inevitably build relationships with the artists, promoters, broadcasters, venues and organizations around them.
But that strength can become a vulnerability when those same relationships intersect with decisions about who gets recognized, funded, booked, nominated or elevated.
The people who understand a culture best are often the people most deeply embedded within it. That is their strength, and potentially their vulnerability.
The old Maple Blues Awards structure provides a useful example. Its 2023 rules relied on a national nominating panel of blues experts, with instrumental or “craft” categories determined by experts drawn from that panel and the broader categories decided by public voting.
The current Canadian Blues Music Awards system is substantially different. Its own published material describes the CBMAs as a separate incorporated national not-for-profit organization, with submissions replacing the old nominating model. Jury members must apply, and are selected from a national pool based on expertise, geographical diversity and national representation. Voting is described as independent and anonymous, apart from the public Fan Favourite category. Committee members are not eligible for the jury pool.
The organization also describes the current awards as a new, independent national program rather than simply a continuation of the previous awards structure.
The Toronto Blues Society likewise states that it is no longer involved in governance, nominations, judging or voting, although it continues to host the awards ceremony.
So what, exactly, has changed?
The answer is that a great deal has changed structurally.
The rules have changed. The submission process has changed. The voting mechanism has changed. The jury model has changed. The organizational structure has changed. The relationship between the awards body and the Toronto Blues Society has changed. The name has changed.
It would therefore be inaccurate to suggest that nothing has changed.
But structural change and cultural change are not necessarily the same thing.
From my perspective, there remains a legitimate question about whether changing the machinery can, by itself, change a culture of gatekeeping. A new system can create stronger safeguards, greater transparency and greater independence, while the people involved still bring with them years of experience, relationships and knowledge accumulated within the previous system.
That is not evidence that the new system is compromised. It is a reason to watch how any new system operates over time.
For me, that question is impossible to separate from my own experience.
And perhaps that is the more uncomfortable question cultural organizations should ask themselves: is reform about changing the rules, or about continually examining how those rules work in practice?
The Demoralization of the Creator
There is a particular kind of exhaustion felt by an artist who spends decades honing an instrument, writing original material and respecting the lineage of a craft, only to encounter a decision-making process that appears to understand the numbers surrounding the work better than the work itself.
For an emerging artist, that can be discouraging. For a career artist, it can be something more profound. After years of building a body of work, contributing to a community and developing relationships within a musical tradition, repeatedly being reduced to statistics or marketing potential can create the impression that the institution has little interest in the actual substance of what the artist has spent a lifetime creating.
The frustration is not necessarily that the decision-maker is a non-musician. Some of the best people I have encountered around music have never made a living from performing, yet they have an extraordinary understanding of artists and an instinctive respect for the work. The problem is cultural distance: the gap that appears when the person holding the decision-making authority has little understanding of the realities of the people on the other side of the desk.
Imagine spending thirty years developing a musical vocabulary, building relationships within a community and contributing to a living tradition, only to find yourself being assessed primarily according to criteria that have little connection to those things. The resulting frustration is not difficult to understand. An artist may reasonably begin to wonder whether the institution wants the culture itself, or simply the marketable version of it.
When creators are treated primarily as liabilities to be managed, content providers to be scheduled, or numbers to be justified, the relationship between artist and institution becomes increasingly transactional. Some artists respond by adapting their presentation to the system. Others find smaller communities in which the work itself remains the principal currency. Some simply stop applying, stop submitting, stop knocking on the door.
The loss is not always immediately visible. A venue can still have a full calendar. A festival can still sell tickets. An organization can still publish an impressive annual report. The machinery can continue functioning while the cultural ecosystem underneath it gradually becomes thinner.
Administration and Curation Are Not the Same Thing
This distinction deserves more attention because administration and curation are often treated as though they are interchangeable. They are not.
Administration is concerned with whether something can happen: whether the budget works, whether the insurance is in place, whether the room is licensed, whether the staffing is adequate and whether the event can be delivered safely and efficiently. Those things matter. Without them, cultural activity becomes much harder to sustain.
Curation asks a different set of questions. What should happen? Why does this artist matter? What does this music say about the community from which it comes? What contribution does this performer make to a particular tradition? What might an audience discover if given an opportunity to hear something unfamiliar? Those questions cannot always be answered by a spreadsheet.
A healthy cultural organization needs both functions. The danger comes when administration begins to replace curation rather than support it. Once that happens, the easiest choices can become the preferred choices: the artists who already have proven audiences, the acts whose marketing material arrives perfectly packaged, the performers who fit an established format and the programming decisions that create the least perceived risk.
That may make an organization easier to manage, but it can also make its cultural offering increasingly predictable.
This is one reason people with genuine musical knowledge can be so valuable within cultural institutions. They do not necessarily need to control everything, and musicians should not automatically be considered better decision-makers simply because they perform. But people who understand music from the inside can bring a form of knowledge that cannot always be acquired through a management course or a marketing report. They understand the difference between a technically competent performance and a meaningful one. They understand why a particular artist may matter to a community. They understand the history behind a genre and can recognize when something genuinely new is emerging from it.
The strongest organizations should therefore not ask whether every decision-maker has a stage history. They should ask whether the people making cultural decisions understand what the stage is for.
Returning the Keys to the Culture
A healthy live music ecosystem cannot thrive when its leadership becomes disconnected from the culture it is responsible for serving. Reclaiming the stage and the institutions behind it does not mean handing every decision to musicians, nor does it mean pretending that administration, business expertise or professional management are unnecessary. They are not. The challenge is to restore cultural understanding to a position of equal importance.
It also means recognizing the problem from both directions.
Cultural institutions need people who understand the music. But they also need structures that protect independent judgment when those people are deeply embedded in the communities they serve.
The answer is not to keep outsiders away from culture. Nor is it to assume that insiders will automatically make better decisions. The answer is to build systems in which expertise, experience, independence and accountability can coexist.
That means supporting independent spaces, grassroots rooms and artist-led platforms where the people making decisions are close enough to the music to understand its realities. It means bringing musicians, experienced listeners, knowledgeable programmers, cultural workers and genuine advocates into the same conversation. It means recognizing that decades spent listening, documenting, performing, teaching or supporting music can produce a form of cultural knowledge that does not appear on a résumé.
It also means being honest about the limitations of measurement. Followers, streams, ticket projections, media reach and marketing campaigns can all tell us something useful. They should inform decisions rather than replace the human judgment required to make them. Cultural value is often difficult to quantify precisely because culture is about meaning, memory, identity, community and human connection.
Sometimes the value is in the song itself. Sometimes it is in the musician who has spent forty years carrying a tradition forward. Sometimes it is in the young artist nobody has discovered yet. Sometimes it is in the small room where fifty people hear something that changes the way they think about music. None of those things becomes less valuable simply because it is difficult to put a number beside it.
Music does not need every decision-maker to be a musician. It does need its decision-makers to understand music as culture rather than merely as an operational product.
And perhaps it needs something else as well: enough distance for judgment to remain independent, and enough cultural understanding for the judgment to mean something.
The Sound Cafe Journal
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