Geisha Alon­zo

Less mon­ey and em­pha­sis is be­ing placed on the cre­ative sec­tor al­though it has been iden­ti­fied as an im­por­tant el­e­ment of the coun­try’s di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion thrust, mu­sic in­dus­try an­a­lyst and con­cert pro­mot­er Nigel Camp­bell said yes­ter­day. That was his as­sess­ment of the 2019 bud­get pre­sent­ed on Mon­day by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert.

In an in­ter­view on CNC 3’s The Morn­ing Brew, Camp­bell said: “Nor­mal­ly when you talk about some­thing with­in the bud­get there’s a kind of pri­or­i­ty for the Gov­ern­ment and there has been de­creas­ing lip ser­vice to the in­dus­try.

“He is us­ing less and less words to de­scribe the cre­ative in­dus­try and it ac­tu­al­ly reached a low of 15 words two years ago but more im­por­tant­ly there he’s ac­tu­al­ly been al­lo­cat­ing less mon­ey.”

Camp­bell said the cre­ative sec­tor had pre­vi­ous­ly been giv­en $6 mil­lion but this de­creased to $4.25 mil­lion last year and in this year’s fis­cal pack­age it was re­duced to $4 mil­lion.

“That kind of small mon­ey is not much you can re­al­ly do any­thing with in a re­al world sense,” he said.

Camp­bell said since the 1990’s Gov­ern­ment has been us­ing the State en­ter­prise mod­el to do “some kind of en­er­giz­ing to make the sec­tor glob­al.” He said he’s not re­al­ly a fan of that strat­e­gy.

“Where­as we might have got­ten a cou­ple bits here and there, in the ac­tu­al grand move­ment,the up­wards and out­wards of our in­dus­try has not re­al­ly hap­pened.

“Some of that blame can fall on the stake­hold­ers them­selves—the ac­tu­al artistes and cre­ators—but the State’s func­tion is sup­posed to be cre­at­ing an en­abling en­vi­ron­ment and I’m not nec­es­sar­i­ly sure that is be­ing done and cer­tain­ly with a $4 mil­lion bud­get I don’t think that can ad­e­quate­ly be done,” he said.

Camp­bell said the Live Mu­sic Dis­trict ini­tia­tive, in­tro­duced in the 2018 bud­get, was not as suc­cess­ful as it should have been.

“It’s a good idea and I am not against that. The min­is­ter used the word suc­cess for the Live Mu­sic Dis­trict and he said there were 300 per­for­mances but when they launched the dis­trict they promised 700 per­for­mances so just by the pure Math­e­mat­ics it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a suc­cess­ful ven­ture go­ing for­ward,” he said.