New Zealand’s Pop Renaissance: A creative industry as ‘after neo-liberal’ social policy

TL;DR: Shuker et al. as discussed by the authors describe the ways in which the state negotiates and leverages domestic popular music artists onto commercial radio through New Zealand on Air, which is based upon state agents developing an institutional isomorphism with existing music industry practices.

Abstract: When New Zealand’s ‘third-way’ Labour government came to power in 1999 it placed a greater policy and funding emphasis on the arts and culture. Like other ‘promotional states’ (Cloonan 1999) the Labour government sought to support the domestic popular music industry through a voluntary radio quota. Drawing on qualitative research, this article describes the ways in which the state, through New Zealand on Air, negotiates and leverages domestic popular music artists onto commercial radio. In this process, state agents mobilise social networks to ‘join-up’ commercially appropriate artists to radio programmers. The success of this programme is based upon state agents developing an institutional isomorphism with existing music industry practices. Even so, popular music makers contest New Zealand on Air’s sympathetic policy settings by citing forms of institutional exclusion. Introduction New Zealand’s pop music has entered a period of unprecedented audibility and visibility, with radio broadcasting more ‘Kiwi’ pop than ever before and domestic sales now comprising 25% of what remains a contracting market (Dann 2006). There is a strong correlation between the Labour-led coalition government’s increased pop funding and this pop renaissance. This state engagement with pop music is, however, just one aspect of a wider creative industries policy drive (see Growth and Innovation Framework 2003), the effects of which roused the Minister of Immigration, David Cunliffe, to claim New Zealand is ‘fizzing and buzzing’ to the groove of an ‘arts and cultural revival’ (New Zealand Herald 2005). Elsewhere in this issue of Popular Music Shuker illustrates how New Zealand’s state can be understood as a ‘promotional state’ that views pop as ‘something of a national asset’ in producing this arts and cultural revival (Cloonan 1999, p. 204). However, New Zealand’s promotional state has a distinctive mode of engaging pop music: it seeks to ‘join-up’ pop producers with the market’s ‘cash nexus’ (Bevir 2005; Craig and Porter 2006). In this process, according to former Minister of Research, Science & Technology, Pete Hodgson (2004), the state acts as a ‘leader, a partner, a broker, a facilitator, and, occasionally, a funder’. The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the partnering, facilitating and brokering practices that state agents engage in to produce New Zealand’s pop revival, and in doing so show how far the New Zealand state has bent towards both market and the cultural forms of