Mr. Philip King:

The model of the music industry at the moment is a very difficult model for any artist and for anybody creating intellectual property. On the one hand, very large record companies, like Universal, when signing an artist will sign them to what they call a 360 deal, which means they will advance some money in the form of a loan in return for the recording rights and the publishing rights, but they will also attach gigging income to the 360 deal because they deem that, by promoting the artist, they have made the artist commercially viable and they want a kick-back from the gig receipts. When I started out in music, an artist released a record and then went on the road to promote the record. Now, it is entirely the other way around, and the artist puts out a record to promote the tour, and their only income is from those places. It is a very different world.

There are various different organisations that do extremely good work and it would be very good if they all came together. The mission of the Other Voices model is to celebrate what is about to happen and to give a platform to the generation of musicians who will be the musicians of the future. If Hozier does his first televised gig in Dingle, that is the sort of thing I am talking about, and our dedication is to that and to finding a platform to make that happen and to make these artists, to use the phrase again, audible and visible.

The Arts Council, when Mr. Dorgan and I were on it, did not recognise traditional music as an art form and we worked very hard to put what we call the traditional arts as a line item in the Arts Council's budget. It does not recognise rock and roll either, which is quite odd. Therefore, when an artist is looking for funding and goes to the Arts Council, there is no subhead under which a rock and roll artist can say, "This is what I do", because it has no box for that. That is nuts, when we think about it.