BOP Consulting's Culture and Creative Industries Blog

Insights into the contemporary craft sector

BOP Consulting is currently working on a major mapping and impact study of the contemporary craft sector in the UK, a project commissioned by the Crafts Council, Creative Scotland, the Arts Council of Wales and Craft Northern Ireland.

The Crafts Council produces regular research briefings of its own on various aspects of craft. Recent ones include Craft and Rural Development, looking at craft's role in the rural creative economy, Craft and the Digital World, exploring craft's use of digital technology, and Craft and Environmental Sustainability. All are worth a read.  

Local TV moves a step closer

Despite continued scepticism about whether local TV is commercially viable in Britain, the government is ploughing ahead with its plans. Sixty-five towns and cities from across the country have been identified as possible locations (having suitable spectrum coverage), and they have been invited to submit bids.

Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, has been holding a series of events as part of the consultation process around local TV - the last two of these will be held in September in Glasgow and London. The DCMS has also released a video in which Hunt makes the case for a local TV network.    

 

Creative industries in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

The three Baltic states have been pioneers in cross-border co-operation around the creative economy, having established a joint network to develop creative industries in 2006. A new report, Creative industries in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 2011, reviews progress in the sector over the last year, noting (among other things) the ways in which mapping exercises have raised the profile of the industries, leading to them being increasingly embedded in government policies.   

Helping new entrants into the media and entertainment sectors

As it is the season of exam and degree results, this latest 'toolkit' may be well-timed. BECTU, the media and entertainment union, has just launched a Creative Toolkit to help potential new entrants to the creative industries get started. It can be found here. 

Promoting Scotland's creative industries

Creative industries, especially digital media, are thought to be doing well in Scotland, and have been declared a priority sector by the Scottish Government. (Creative Scotland has just announced a new fund to support training and development in the TV and digital media industries, for instance.)

This informative (if slightly plodding) video from Scottish Development International showcases some of the businesses doing interesting things in the sector. 

 

Re-thinking high streets and town centres

In May 2011 the Government commssioned Mary Portas to lead a review to look at ways of tackling the decline in Britain's high streets. The think-tank Urban Pollinators, in conjunction with a group of collaborators which include the Empty Shops Network, Meanwhile Space and ResPublica, have published their thoughts on what might be done here. The vision is of a 21st century agora:  

Just as the ancient Greek agora was the place where democracy was exercised, so the 21st century agora should be a place that meets the civic needs of today’s and tomorrow’s public: engagement in society, in culture and the arts, in learning, in relaxation and enjoyment of green space, in sport and play, in socialising and debating local futures – and in shopping and trading.

The report includes several interesting case studies from places like Brixton Village, Hackney, Garstang and Todmorden.

 

Entertainment companies react to differences in digital piracy rates

The Economist has an interesting article on the differences in digital piracy rates from country to country, and the effects these have on entertainment companies' behaviour. Such companies are pulling back from Spain, for instance, where piracy is rife, and concentrating more on places where it is less of a problem, such as Germany or South Korea. 

What drives volunteering in culture and sport?

The National Centre for Social Research has produced a report (commissioned by the DCMS's CASE group) called Understanding the Drivers of Volunteering in Culture and Sport. It uses regression and latent class analysis to analyse data from the Taking Part survey, and finds (across culture and sport combined):  

• Higher levels of volunteering amongst men, younger people and white people.

• Those with better health tended to be more likely to volunteer. 

• Higher levels of volunteering were generally associated with lower levels of deprivation

More specifically, volunteering in the sports sector was higher for those who participate in sports, younger people and men; in the arts and heritage sectors it was higher among women and older people.

AHRC announces Creative Economy Hubs

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has announced which universities are to lead its Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy programme. The four winners are the Universities of Lancaster and Dundee, Queen Mary (University of London), and the University of the West of England, which is based in Bristol.

The AHRC is investing some £16m in the projects which are aimed at 'building new partnerships and entrepreneurial capacity in the Creative Economy and increasing the number of arts and humanities researchers actively engaged in research-based knowledge exchange'. Each university will work with many other organisations in its hub.

For more details on each university's plans, see the press releases from Lancaster, Dundee, Queen Mary, and UWE,

 

Comparisons of sporting and cultural engagement across Europe

The DCMS has just published a report written by Orian Brook, its ESRC Placement Fellow, looking at rates of public engagement in sport and culture across Europe. Cross-country comparisons are always tricky, but Brook finds, among other things, that:

• Consistently higher attendance is found in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

• Great Britain is in the top quartile for attendance to theatre, public libraries, museums/galleries and reading books. It has lower than average attendance at sport events.

• In most of Europe more people attend sports events than the theatre: this is not the case in Great Britain, due both to our high ranking for theatre attendance and low ranking for sports event attendance. 

British Council relaunches its Creative Economy website

The British Council has recently relaunched its Creative and Cultural Economy programme website. The programme aims to connect 'people who work in and inform the creative and cultural industries around the world with those in the UK'.

BOP Consulting has worked with the British Council in this area for several years. We wrote Mapping the Creative Industries: A Toolkit for the Council (it can be found on this page), and have been involved in a number of  international initiatives, including the recent UK-China Creative Economy summit and the Vietnam networks and mapping project, where earlier this year BOP's Head of Research, Richard Naylor, travelled to Ho Chi Minh City to run a training exercise on mapping. Below is a photo of Richard (on the left) receiving a bouquet of flowers in thanks.

 

 

Future business models for British libraries

The Local Government Group and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council have published Future Libraries: Change, options and how to get there. The report can be found here. 

The report is a summary of the Future Libraries Programme, which was launched last year to help develop innovative new models for library services in the face of spending cuts. It identifies four options for local authorities:

• Running libraries in partnership with the private sector, charities and other councils.

• Extending the reach and range of library services by integrating them with other community facilities like churches, shops and village halls and providing public services such as health centres and the police surgeries in existing libraries.

• Sharing services like back offices and mobile libraries with neighbouring local authorities to make stretched resources go further.

• Giving library users the ability to play a more active role in running library services themselves.

The music industry's tough year in 2010

PRS for Music has produced its annual summary of the state of the British music industry. Adding up the UK music industry 2010 finds that total UK music revenues fell by 4.8 per cent, to £3.8bn. Both recorded and live music saw revenue fall by the order of 7 per cent. This was partially offset by continued growth in digital sales (up 18 per cent to £316m). PRS picks out three trends that help to explain the year:

The aggregate trade value of physical albums has near enough halved in five years, and now appears to have entered into an accelerating rate of decline.

The spiky nature of demand re-emphasises how critical the fourth quarter is to the overall picture, generating 40 percent of total trade value for the year, with physical product still making up three-quarters of that demand. The fourth quarter 2010 was a particular disappointment.

There are two supply-side developments worth noting: the release schedule may have lacked the strength of the previous year, while new BPI research on breakthrough acts – bands that pass 100,000 album sales for the first time – show that 2010 hit a new low, with only 17 UK acts making it past this watermark, compared to a broadly consistent 25 in recent years.

Culture and the National Planning Policy Framework

The Government issued its draft National Planning Policy Framework at the end of July - it can be read here. The draft is currently out for consultation (until 17 October), but is already proving controversial, as this furious piece from Simon Jenkins illustrates.

One particular area of concern was highlighted by Simon Tait, writing in Arts Industry - the almost complete absence of references to cultural assets in the document:

The word culture does appear, but only in reference to “conserving heritage assets” and “vintage trees”. Nothing about theatres, art galleries, museums, community arts, street festivals. The paper recognises the need for retail, leisure, commercial, community services and residential development. But not culture.

As Tait points out, the National Trust and the Theatres Trust are trying to encourage people to respond to the consultation.

BOP offered its own related thoughts on cultural place-making and localism back in April; they can be read here.

 

Insights into the consumption of communications services in Britain

Ofcom has produced its annual Communications Market Report for 2011. The report covers a huge array of information about the consumption of communications and digital media in Britain, and is well worth exploring. These are just a few of its findings:

• Total UK broadband take-up has now reached 74 per cent

• Over a quarter of adults (27 per cent) and almost half of teenagers (47 per cent) now own a smartphone

• Nearly 10 million TV sets were sold in 2010, almost all of which were HD ready

• Internet advertising spend grew by 16 per cent in 2010 to over £4 billion

• Urban areas in Scotland and rural areas in Northern Ireland are lagging behind the rest of the UK in their take-up of digital services.

UK Government accepts Hargreaves' review recommendations

The Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has announced that the government intends to accept all ten of the recommendations made by the review into intellectual property led by Ian Hargreaves (the review can be found here). Cable also said that plans to block illegal filesharing sites were to be dropped, as they were felt to be unworkable.

The response to these announcements has generally been positive. Glyn Moody, writing in Computer World UK, is one of those to welcome them, saying that:

perhaps the key proposal of the report was one that might be overlooked as being “obvious”: that policy should be based on evidence. But the importance of that truly profound idea can be seen from the number of times that it is invoked by the UK government in its reponse. For example:

the Government will in future give limited weight in IP policy-making to evidence that is not sufficiently open and transparent in its approach and methodology, and we will make it clear where we are taking this view. IPO will set out guidance in Autumn 2011 on what constitutes open and transparent evidence, in line with professional practice.  

Moody points out that much policy in this area has been driven by industry lobbying - this new approach, if followed through, represents a major shift in direction.

Lessons in branding a city

The European branch of the Urban Land Institute has published a short summary of a workshop it ran looking at city branding, using the  case studies of Hamburg, Barcelona, London and Edinburgh. The report distils the findings of the workshop intop ten key principles.They include:

• Brands without substance are meaningless.

• In public-private relationships, the private sector organisation’s brand is just as important as the city’s.

• When building brands, cities must take advantage of local culture and history in order todifferentiate themselves from others. Authenticity is valuable.

• Cities should use what resources they already have. “Throwing a lifebelt to an abandoned brand is better than trying to launch a new one.”

BFI's Statistical Yearbook 2011 released

The BFI (British Film Institute) has released its 2011 statistical yearbook as it inherits the responsibility for such data from the UK Film Council. There is a vast amount of information in the book (which actually covers 2010), but the headlines include:

• Toy Story 3 was the biggest UK box-office hit in 2010, grossing £73m.

• Box office receipts were up 5% to £988m, but cinema visits were down 2%. 

• 'British' films (broadly defined, as ever) accounted for 24% of the market.

 

Measuring the social and economic impacts of culture and sport

The DCMS's Culture and Sport Evidence Programme (CASE) has published a new report it commissioned from the consultants TBR and the Cities Institute. The Art of the Possible? explores the feasibility of using secondary quantitative data to measure the impact of culture and sport investments. Amusingly, a frank editing comment has been accidentally left in the table of contents:

4.2 TACKLING EVALUATION ISSUES [THIS SECTION ISN’T THAT GOOD] ...........67

The report is a long one, but concludes that there are only two feasible measures:

• The impact on property prices and business start ups of the cultural and/or sporting facilities could be examined. Existing research on this has been done for sport stadia.

• Impact on visitor numbers, overnight stays and employment could be assessed where a project plays a significant role in a ‘destination’.

 N.B. The version of the report that was posted on the DCMS website turned out to have been a draft posted in error; it has now been replaced by the correct version here.

The pleasures and frustrations of blogging

This blog reached its first birthday at the weekend - we'd like to thank our readers (whoever you are) for persevering with us.

Some commentators suggest that social media will transform your business. Our experience, so far at least, has been closer to that described by George Brock here. Brock, a professor of journalism at City University and a former Times journalist, was reflecting on his own first year as a blogger. Among his observations:

Few blogs are instant hits. Virtually everyone who publishes their own work – that’s now a colossal number of people – nurtures a secret dream that their words will be found to be so dazzling, so wise and so eloquent that thousands will circulate these posts among themselves and fame will be instant. This gradually gives way to a much older and more solid truth: stamina, patience and the long haul matter in this, just as in most things.