In our time we are experiencing an unprecedented amount of social and cultural change. Nowhere is this change more visible or tangible than within the fields popular music and popular culture, both in its making and consumption.
The music industry, as a centrally controlled arbiter of popular taste, monopolising distribution networks and air time, has begun to dissipate and fracture.
Many factors have been cited as causes for this change. Perhaps none more so than the rapid growth and expansion of the internet and the numerous opportunities this has provided for musicians to network and support each other’s musical development.
The D.I.Y message implicit within the late 70s counterculture of self record, self release, signalled the initial thirst for a context of music making and production beyond sheer market forces: the culture of supply and demand.
We are now witnessing its second wave. This time around the technology is in place to see its reach extend, out of the grip of central control and into the public arena.
We are witnessing a newly democratised musical environment where musicians and artists can freely re-assess their musical potential and question what may be music’s intrinsic worth.
I don’t think there has ever been such an exciting time to learn to play an instrument and get involved in the culture of popular music making.
It is my belief that popular music, a form born out a human need to express one’s own individual experience, is now reaching out towards its full potential.
The British Academy of New Music (BANM) wants to be a part of this new musical future. To embrace and support the individual, whilst offering the tangible skills to enable individuality to achieve its maximum expressive potential.
BANM has its sights fixed on becoming a champion of musical skill development and creative and artistic expression. Such ambitions go beyond the slavery of genre and transcend the degradation of music to product and the margins of profit and loss.
We are about celebrating the intrinsic value of music, freed from the shackles of an industry that is imploding. In a future filled with less and less certainty, one constant still remains: the creation of great music. It is our aim to empower the musician to create and perform great music, for in this act is the future of music born.
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