Backdrop The music industry in Europe and beyond offers highly attractive employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for young musicians, designers and cultural managers. Yet the creative youth’s socio-economic reality is quite often precarious. Closely intertwined with the entrepreneurial risk and only with additional income they are able to generate a decent living beyond poverty level – true for both the involved EU countries and the partner country Ghana. Research stresses a lack of skills of young music businesses as to self-employment, negotiation power and media competency. These weaknesses increase the vulnerability and hamper the whole creative sector’s prosperity. The issues of copyright and fair remuneration are major challenges.
Objectives Taking up these challenges, the project will build up young artists’, creative workers’ and managers’ capacity in order to strengthen their market position and standing vis-à-vis the established operators of the value chain. In detail it aims to improve entrepreneurship competence, alternative use of the copyright and collection practices and new income systems based on digital markets. Implementation The partners will build up a cooperation structure to implement and disseminate capacity building activities and produce an e-Publication. They will conduct three Youth Mobilities involving more than 50 young artists and cultural managers from four countries directly linked to the music business offering practical and vocational training. Moreover the beneficiaries will roll-out and multiply the project’s impact in cultural /youth organisations and within their position in the music business value chain.MethodologyThree Youth Mobilities will offer training and exchange, survey and reflection on central issues and the participants’ professional experience as addressed in the objectives. It will encourage and support participants to undertake further surveys and launch networks on these topics on local level, feeding results back to the following workshops and the final output.Results The output is an e-Publication compiling the project’s crucial contents and findings with recommendations. The outcome will be improved capacities and professional prospects, including new job opportunities of participants and partner organisations and further agents, given that they act as multipliers in broad networks.Consortium The consortium comprises competent partners from Europe (DE, FR, UK, ES) and Ghana being local, national, EU and international cultural players. They consolidate the required expertise and include central agents of the value chain in music business. The project tackles central EU topics, i.e. youth unemployment, entrepreneurship and the copyright issue. Despite disparities in a cooperation between developed and a developing country there is a solid common ground for promising joint development, which is the necessary infrastructure for digital and a dynamic music market.