Musicians… Have your Say

Between September 2006 and January 2007, the hub ran the UK?s biggest ever survey of professional musicians and music students.

Nearly three thousand took part in our Musicians?Have Your Say survey, which was commissioned by the Musicians Benevolent Fund. Our brief was to explore the following:

• Levels, and areas, of need amongst professional musicians and young musicians currently planning a career as a musician and what they think would help them to overcome these needs

• Awareness ? and perception – of the MBF and its work, amongst these musicians

• The impact of its current grant-giving and other services, in terms of its reach (breadth) and degree of success (?depth?) in helping recipients to overcome their needs and achieve their ambitions

Working with industry and higher education colleagues, we distributed over 70 000 printed questionnaires, and directed musicians and students to our on line surveys. We produced and distributed over 50 000 postcards about the research, via 150 independent record, instrument and sheet music retailers, studios and inserts into music magazines, and also put together a comprehensive advertising campaign.

In order to translate the survey responses into research findings and subsequently into recommendations for the Fund, we analysed the hundreds of pages of data which the survey produced, looking for trends and anomalies and identifying the stories behind these trends. We also ran a series of focus groups and put together an industry panel, in order to test our findings and recommendations.

Our research findings and recommendations have provided the fund with a clear analysis of the key issues and opportunities facing musicians, key data about their careers and a range of detailed recommendations for how they can best meet their ambition to ?listen to musicians and respond to their needs?.

The Fund will publish our research findings in Autumn 2007, so that the intelligence we have gathered about musicians and music students can be used by industry bodies, funders, higher education providers and government to inform their future activity. We hope that all our work on this incredibly exciting piece of research will have a real, positive impact on musicians across the UK.

Want to see the research findings?
To stay up to date with the research publication, email Julia Payne at julia@thehubuk.com