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Mark de Clive-Lowe in Japanese yukata

Sandra Wall - Norrköping City of Music

by Music Tech Fest | MTF Podcast

Sandra Wall is Trade and Industry Developer for the Creative Sector in Norrköping Kommun. It’s a small to medium city at the southern end of Sweden that is punching above its weight in culture, creativity, digital innovation and equality. And at the centre of a lot of that activity is music.

Sandra describes herself as “born audience”. She’s a champion of making music, and understands that, almost as much as it needs musicians, music needs the support of non-musicians. Her role places music at the forefront of the city’s activities and its stories.

Read about Norrköping
Video: THRIVE - Vi är också Norrköping

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF Podcast. While MTF is a global community with events, innovators, and contributors all over the world, a lot of what we do happens at the city level. We often collaborate with local policymakers, citywide initiatives, and local ecosystems to enhance that connection between arts and science, academia and industry, innovation and policy. And, of course, some of those city ecosystems require some encouragement to push ahead in certain directions, especially when they’ve long been known for a thing that is maybe not so much a thing anymore, while others are racing ahead with good ideas, great initiatives, and, most importantly, brilliant people leading the way. And Sandra Wall is one such person.

She’s Trade and Industry Developer for the Creative Sector in Norrköping municipality. Now, if you’re not familiar with Norrköping, it’s not too far from Linköping, a little bit further from Örebro, and quite some distance from Umeå. And all of those things, they’re in Sweden. Sandra’s helped Norrköping to be a leading light in culture and innovation, she’s a champion for progressive projects around inclusion and cutting edge technologies, and she’s worked with MTF to showcase some of those initiatives both here in Sweden and around the world. She’s managed the project to make Norrköping a UNESCO City of Music, and in 2018 she worked very closely with MTFer Hakan Lidbo to help literally turn Norrköping itself into an orchestra as part of the wider MTF Stockholm activities. So, from Norrköping, just an hour and a half or so south of Stockholm, this is Sandra Wall. Enjoy.

Dubber      Sandra Wall, thanks so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast today.

Sandra       Thank you for having me. Happy to talk to you again.

Dubber      Yeah, it’s nice to have you back because you were at MTF in Stockholm in 2018. Gosh, that was a long time ago.

Sandra       Time flies, but that was great. It was a really interesting look into your work and your network. It was amazing.

Dubber      And you came to us, to Stockholm, from Norrköping. Where and what is Norrköping?

Sandra       Norrköping is the typical old industrial city that turned to culture and knowledge innovation. The old industry buildings here have become venues and museums and other parts of the cultural life in Sweden.

Dubber      And how’s that going during COVID times?

Sandra       It’s pretty hard. But also Norrköping, being used to harsh times, actually, we have the “Let’s create.” motto, that we work together to overcome all of our situations in a city like this. So very creative minds. So it’s tough times, but already I can tell there will be creative solutions, so it’s a bit hopeful.

Dubber      Right. One of the things you did when you came to MTF in Stockholm was you brought some Norrköping with you, at least virtually. There was the huge visualisation table where people could zoom in on it, but there was also the VR thing where you could ride a bike through what Norrköping was about to become, and it was a whole lot of new development that didn’t actually exist at the time. Does it exist now? Can you actually ride a bike through there yet?

Sandra       Not yet, but you could ride a bike through the area they just started building it, so it’s much closer than we were then. And also during that time we visualised what the ground actually looked under all these buildings that are going up ahead. So we’ve checked out all kinds of things that are going on in the harbour, because this is a new part of this city close to the harbour, so you can imagine we needed to know what it looked like below, as well. So lots of interesting buildings going up there. And also we’re waiting for Ostlanken, our fast train that will connect us to Stockholm. It will only be 50 minutes, maybe. Right now it’s an hour and a half, approximately.

Dubber      Right, okay. But one of the main reasons that we connected with you was that Norrköping is a UNESCO City of Music, and you’re basically in charge of UNESCO City of Music. What’s a City of Music?

Sandra       A City of Music is a city that makes culture, and music foremost, of course, a tool for the city development. When there are hard times, you make culture part of meeting the challenges. And you need to fund it, of course, but most of all you need to accept it’s part of the city identity. We’ve had a symphony orchestra for many years, and 25 years ago when there was tough times for this industrial city we made the old paper mill in the middle of the city a new concert hall, and that changed things, and it grew from there. And we have not only music but also all these other expressions of culture.

So I’d say that you need to recognise culture as a part of the whole city, the system. And we talk a lot about our old industrial block here, and we have a cultural block. And even though I work with trade and industry development, it’s really important to have an attractive city and living live stages if you want this city to keep on being a place where you like to live.

But most of all, of course, the music is in the centre of it all. And we have so many genres, so much indie music, so many great… I don’t know what you call it, but lower education for music, because we have universities in Stockholm, Örebro, and Växjö all around us, and people go away for a while to study and then they come back. And we’ve fostered artists, like soloists for violin or popstars or… We have our own reggae sound, and we have a techno cluster that’s just amazing. So all these different kinds of music clusters go together, and that’s… Also, as you know, there’s a tight connection to Linköping, and visualisation, gaming, and also, of course, music tech. In Linköping there are some really interesting names, like Softube, and we have virtual leaders here.

Dubber      Right. I’m trying to get a sense of who lives there and how many people… Just to give us a sense of the scale, how many people live in Norrköping?

Sandra       Soon to be 150,000, but, say, 145,000. So it’s a small city if you look globally, but it’s one of the ten biggest cities in Sweden.

Dubber      And is it a young city or is it an older city? What sort of people live there?

Sandra       It’s an old city, I’d say. The name köping, it means city of trade, and it’s a very old… More than 650 years, so it’s more like an old industry village from before, and now it grew into something else. So I’d say it’s an old city. And also the logistics are still here, and it’s important to music as well. And events, a lot of big events managers try this city out. They try to explore a little bit what could be used and how you could change festivals and try out new things. We keep doing that. So even next year, 2021, when things are certainly looking a bit glum, we actually get a new kind of festival, a platform for innovating the future after COVID-19.

Dubber      Right. Because you did until recently have the biggest festival in Sweden, didn’t you?

Sandra       Yeah. Until a couple of years ago we had Bråvalla Festival by FKP Scorpio. They came here to actually try new things out. And there was this old airfield they could use for a couple of years, and they did. So they tried it out. And also they created Where’s the Music which was a traditional showcase festival in the middle of the city. So all these things, they created a new kind of companies in Norrköping, so now there are companies working nationally for event production and all these things. So it was really good for us to learn the industry and also get a lot of interesting people to our city.

Dubber      Is it important to you that Norrköping becomes associated with a particular thing? That it’s known internationally? Because it seems like you’ve got a lot of threads going on. Is it more about making it a good place for people who live in Norrköping, or is it about promoting Norrköping to the world?

Sandra       It’s definitely about making it a great place to live for people who live in Norrköping, and also, of course, for our music community, for them to thrive. That’s what it’s all about. So it’s about enabling them to fulfil all the crazy ideas or all the brilliant ideas, and whether they fail or succeed, it’s great to see them try things out. It’s all about the music to me, but also about the rest of the cultural cluster here because music ties it all together. It’s a part of almost everything we do here. There’s a lot of film going on, and gaming and stuff as well, of course. So, yeah, it’s about Norrköping.

Dubber      Sure. When I lived in the UK I lived in Birmingham, and there was a lot of talk about being an old industrial city, all of these sorts of things, and having a vibrant music community, but a lot of the measure of success, quite often, depending on who you were speaking to, but if a musician was successful they moved to London. Is it the same here in Sweden? One of the measures of your success of being a musician in Norrköping is that you don’t live in Norrköping anymore?

Sandra       I’d say so. We have Stockholm so close by they might not even have to move, actually. But we want them to succeed, and it’s lovely to have a city of music like Stockholm close by. It’s a gateway to a lot of opportunities, so we embrace that. And to us, it would be great if we actually plant the seed here and they go off in the world and then they come back. That’s pretty much what we hope for. But of course we’d love to see people thrive here as well and not have to move. So, basically, we want both parties to connect. So we have a lot of music producers from Norrköping in Stockholm, a lot of musicians in all kinds of theatres and live music and TV shows.

Dubber      Yeah. And you’re the Trade and Industry Developer for the Creative Sector. What does the job actually entail? What is it you do on a day-to-day basis?

Sandra       I do everything from mapping our companies, and due to what kind of needs they have we try to help out. It could be facilitate, establish something new. It could also be trying to find new opportunities like development projects. And definitely a lot of matchmaking and networking. So I’d say pretty much what an industry does, but, of course, I think my job is much more fun because there’s a lot of creative people out there. You never really know what the next day will bring.

Of course, it’s been… I’ve been heartbroken this spring, seeing all these good companies, all these good people, struggling just to survive, actually. From 100 percent, a lot going on, actually been in business for maybe 40 years, and suddenly you had nothing for a couple of months and you don’t know when it’s about to start up. And in some way it’s been tough in Sweden because we didn’t have the total lockdown, but this part was total lockdown, so it’s been a parallel world for us to work in.

Dubber      I know that there are some initiatives that the Swedish government is doing at a national level. Is there anything that the local government is doing to help artists, musicians, creative industries, those sorts of things?

Sandra       Yeah. We’ve tried to help out, both to apply for the national regional funding, of course, but also to help out looking at our funding. We’ve changed our funding a little bit. We changed the integration fund on 3.3 million Swedish crowns. We made it a new funding for culture and organisations, for them to apply to. And also we let the organisations keep their funding, even if they don’t have the opportunity to fulfil what they need to get the municipal funding, but we try to find ways for them to do it in another way and let them keep… If they were supposed to make a big event that you have to cancel then they keep it, and they try to work in other ways.

We also made a big campaign on live in Norrköping. You know it’s hard to monetise live-streaming, but we wanted to open up our empty stages for the people that are just on the verge of being professional. So we opened up our municipal big stages for them to practice and get some routine, and we also made sure we had the technique and people who know how to live-stream in a great way. So in Norrköping there’s been a lot of live-streaming. So, actually, three or four of our biggest festivals went digital. They didn’t cancel. Like Bob Marley, who’s been going on every year since he passed away. And also our talent festival, it turned out great. And also the symphony orchestra actually finished their spring season through digital concert, which is great, actually.

Dubber      Right. So a live-streamed concert performance by the orchestra?

Sandra       Yeah.

Dubber      Fantastic.

Sandra       They finished. And they even recorded… They usually bring in schools, so they made special digital concerts for young, and they send it. So it’s great. They actually did everything they should have done, but they live-streamed it or recorded it. It was great to see. I think they had a lot of fun. They went on social media, and then they broke up in small ensembles and went to the elderly homes and played small… Outside their windows where it was safe, so it was amazing to see.

Now that we can be 50 people we have a national event manager that… He throws garden concerts with some of Sweden’s big artists like Christian Kjellvander and Good Harvest and others. So the creativity, it just keeps going, so we try to support that.

Sorry, back to your question. We try to adjust funding. We try to readjust their competence. Like the event managers, they have been great for ICA handla mat, for the support when we started to have to deliver food through internet.

Dubber      For the international audience, ICA being the supermarket chain.

Sandra       Yeah. Our event managers are amazing. Those companies are amazing at logistics, so they’ve been good. And also some of our artists have worked on it, so sometimes people got an artist by their door with the food supply. And, of course, that’s not what we want for them, but we want them to survive, to have their income. And it was more fun for them to work together, I think.

Dubber      Sure. Are things looking better now, or is it still a bad time?

Sandra       I’d say in Sweden we have hard times ahead. Right now we have, still, municipal regional governmental funding. We don’t rely so much on ticket sales or sponsorships like in many other countries, but this will be tough now because this is not core… Within the municipality, of course, culture is a really big part of it, especially in a City of Music like Norrköping, but it’s still school and healthcare and all the municipal administration that’s number one, and this is something that you could cut a little bit. So the challenge here will be working for culture and funding to still thrive in Sweden and in Norrköping.

Dubber      Because I know there are a lot of cities around the world who struggle to take culture seriously and to fund it properly. Does being a City of Music help with that? Other politicians with other agendas taking culture seriously locally? Or is it still an uphill battle to try and get things funded or promoted? To move to the top of the agenda?

Sandra       It’s always a struggle, but maybe not as much. We have a mission statement from the UNESCO, we have guidelines from Swedish UNESCO, that somehow strengthens the importance, and we always have that to fall back on in our debates on culture and music. And also I think there’s an awareness in a city like Norrköping about what culture is, and how even though we have great sports events and we have great sports arenas and organisations, well, it’s not one or the other. It’s both of them together that makes it all work, somehow.

Dubber      When you and I first started talking a few years back… And obviously we were talking about music and we were talking about tech start-ups and gaming and film, there’s a great film industry there, and you also told me about visualisation being something that’s big in Norrköping, and I didn’t know what that was. Do you want to tell me what you mean when you say visualisation?

Sandra       For me it’s innovation and tech that shows something so you understand it, and it’s usually immersive production. Like we have a dome that is one of the very best in the world, actually, and the productions that they show there, that are sometimes produced in Norrköping, it makes you understand through visualisation what it means. It could be very complicated things, or it could be that our astronaut from Sweden, Christer Fuglesang, he brought us to his hoods in space. He could guide you and tell you what it looks like and you can follow.

So I’d say visualisation is all innovation, technique. Like the visualisation boards make it possible to actually look into a mummy. In the museums you can just watch the first layer, but visualisation technique makes it possible for you to look at all the layers, to just swipe down into all of this. And I’d say visualisation within research for healthcare is very interesting. This table, of course, is used for autopsies and all these kinds of things.

So to me, visualisation is as cool in gaming as in healthcare, as in the dome productions, and it could also be very, very helpful within city development, like I talked about before. Where is it toxic? Where you can see it, you can visualise it. But of course, today it’s a lot about… We’ve had a 3D, we have all kinds of new techniques coming in, so this will develop. And I’m not the expert, but this is really, really interesting.

Dubber      Yeah. Because when you said you were going to bring a visualisation table to Music Tech Fest I honestly didn’t know what that was, what that would look like. And, really, it’s a giant, really giant, television screen, but it’s a touch interactive…

Sandra       It sort of looks like a big iPad, and you can just find things in it.

Dubber      Absolutely, yeah. And it’s completely responsive, but you can, as you say, go down layers and look at the things in depth, and it’s just a really… Even though it’s essentially two dimensional because it’s a flat surface, it’s a really, completely immersive way of understanding things. And it’s not something I’d come across, so it was quite amazing to have that.

Sandra       And now we have companies here, of course, that develop this and worked with museums and exhibitions all over the world to further that technique. So you need to come again.

Dubber      Yeah, for sure. I want to talk about Thrive a little bit, this “We are also Norrköping.”, because that’s something that we were really proud, as MTF, to take to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Do you want to introduce the project and what it was and what it involves?

Sandra       This was a collaboration. It was the social entrepreneur, sibship, came to me, as the focal point of City of Music, and she said “People say that young women are hard to reach to work with things, like when they want to start music or be into sports, but they’re not hard to reach. I could do a project trying to help young women express themselves.”. And we focussed on music and freedom of speech and expression, and we found… I think there was 24 young women from 17 different countries in the end.

Dubber      Right. Because there was a particular group of young women that were being sought after.

Sandra       Yeah. They were living with restrictions at home, and also some of them were pretty new in Norrköping, newly arrived, and also some of them had really traumatic experiences, but some of them also grew up here and were… They have different religious beliefs, and it was a really, really tough group. But we had ten meetings ahead of the actual project, which turned out to be a summer job because we realised if you make it a job and the families get an introduction and are included then they will get to come. Because some of these young women are not even let into the university, their applications are erased. You know how tough it could be.

Dubber      Do you mean by strict families?

Sandra       Yeah. So to make this project work we had to make it respectful to what we believe in and to the municipal rules and equality, but also to make it possible for these young women to be a part of it. And the awesome thing was that they got an education in music production, songwriting, they tried out being dancers and artists and singers and they tried filming, but most of all they learned about the society. They learned about their rights, and that women can be pilots or part of the government as well. So they got to look around a little bit and got to experience things in Norrköping and in Sweden.

And most of all, they made this amazing production with a great music producer called Viktor Löfgren, and also we had the film company of Runda Bordet, and also we had some help with the dancing from the regional cluster. So they made this song Thrive where they tell people exactly how they feel, and it’s amazing how they could hardly talk to each other the first five times that they met, and at the end of the summer they are all so proud of this song. And I wish we could have done more to follow that up, but most of them are still active in Norrköping, of course, in several different projects, and some in music and some in other ways.

And also we did a follow-up project in 2019, and that song is called The Power of Equality, and then we had both young men and women in the same group in a part of the city that’s pretty rough right now. It’s been hard the last couple of years, so it’s a challenge, but they did so well also. They did this amazing music video, and it was sibship and the same producers that did it in 2019. And this production, you brought Thrive to Austin, and we brought The Power of Equality to Fête de la Musique, a 12 hour live-streamed festival for all the Music Cities within UNESCO. This spring, actually.

Dubber      Oh, fantastic. Yeah, because it just struck me, it was such an amazing project to take these young women who really were isolated and restricted from doing all sorts of things, particularly, I think, creative things, and then brought together and then introduced to this world where women can do all of these different things, whether it’s being a pilot or, as you say, being in government. But turning that experience into collaboratively writing and producing what’s essentially a… It’s a really good pop song, and they look like a band when they perform it on the video. I’ll link to the video in the podcast.

Sandra       Yeah, please do. The other UNESCO cities will do the same project now, so I’m looking forward to the songs coming up ahead.

Dubber      That’s fantastic, because my hometown, Auckland, is also a UNESCO city.

Sandra       Definitely, yeah, and they’re working on it. I know that Mark Roach is the head of that work.

Dubber      Fantastic. Tell me about Future Echoes. What’s that?

Sandra       Future Echoes is a new platform that we hope will somehow be the connection for people, because we need to rebuild… We say the music industry, but what is really the music industry right now? And how will we go on? How will we recover? So I’d say it’s an innovative kind of showcase festival. There will be new music, like on a showcase festival, where we want, of course, people from all over the world to find new music and enjoy it and bring it home, or bring it here. But there will be a lot of focus on the conference, and this will be kind of a puzzle where people bring their own pieces of the puzzle within the frame of Future Echoes because it will all be about “So what now? What will happen? How can we support this?”. It will be for Music Cities. What could cities do? What are cities doing? Bring in the best practices and talk about it. And we have some really, really great and powerful collaborations within this project, so it’s just starting to take some shape because it needs everyone to put their pieces into it.

But most of all, it’s built on the showcase festival concept but we’re trying to make it something new. Like the dome for visualisation will definitely be in the heart of it, and also we bring other parts of the music like gaming and music tech and other things that connect with the music industry.

So for me, we are the host city, we are not the event managers. It’s Discover Sensation and Musichelp that are producing this festival, so it’s very interesting to be part of it and bring the local regional work in. So I’d say a lot of people from our region will be part of this new platform, and hopefully a lot of people will come in from abroad to bring life to it. So it will be interesting to see. And of course, you know how it is different focus every year, of course, and we’re hoping to be able to host it as planned in 2021 but there are three different scenarios because everyone’s safety first.

Dubber      So what’s plan B? Is it something that you could easily do online?

Sandra       Plan B is actually postponing it in 2021 to… When we had the Music Cities Forum with Sound Diplomacy the same week as the Night of Culture it worked out really well. So in case February is too soon, the first scenario is to move it to the Night of Culture and connect them again, but then start over in 2022, in February, because the end of February will be the slot where Future Echoes suits the Swedish industry to come visit, I’d say.

Dubber      I want to talk a little bit about you, and why it’s you that’s doing this. And I know that you came from a journalism background and you were interested in music. Where does this start for you?

Sandra       I was always the odd one out. The culture lover in a family of sports. Or I work at the municipality or the media or theatre house with music and culture, where that’s not the core. So I’d say a love for culture, and maybe I just love hearing a good story, getting these feelings. I read a lot, watch a lot of movies, and love theatre, dance, music, anything. But in the end, it was music that was the connecting dot for me. It always came back to music. And I love all genres, classic, jazz, pop music, I love pop music. And British music is actually a favourite, so that’s funny. But I’d say, for me, it all came… That was my interest, my main interest. Actually, at the university I have done a program for culture and society and journalism and ethics, and I read also theatre and all things connecting all this, like documentary film.

But to me it was a natural way of finding my place within the communication lane because, to me, I’ve never wanted to be on stage, I never wanted to sing. I’m born audience. That’s what I am. So to me, working from the audience is… I just want to enable things, create awareness, so I always worked with that. If it was for the regional theatre, where I started out, then it was about those productions. And within the media it was tough because I came in as a young woman and worked with… I started out our local paper’s internet website for news and then started up the channel for TV, local TV. And, to me, culture was always the most interesting thing, so I ended up, of course, on entertainment news, and then the cultural editor for the local paper. And doing this, and all these development projects, you learn a lot along the way, especially since Bråvalla and Where’s the Music, so you get a good perspective. And also I entered some international… What do you call it? Educations, but for editors, cultural editors. So went to New York for a couple of weeks and learned a lot about how everything from Tribeca Film Festival to other art expressions worked, and how they worked with them on a city level.

So this is where the interest come. And when they created this Project Manager at the Trade and Industry Office, I was actually writing about it, I wasn’t supposed to apply for it, but these things happen. And becoming the Project Manager, the first thing I did was to start a process to apply for the UNESCO Creative Cities Network because I’d been in touch with them through my work before, and I thought their work connecting culture and city development is very interesting.

Dubber      Sweden is thought of internationally as if not a utopia for gender equality then at least doing it better than most. Did you find, still, there were any hurdles, any friction? Was there anything that you needed to fight against in order to get where you’ve got, or do you think you’ve had it maybe if not easier than most then at least the same amount of hard as everybody else?

Sandra       Let me just say it’s been easier working my way up in Sweden than it would have been in many other countries. I work in a global network where I can tell it’s a struggle being a woman and working, especially on an international level. So I’d say in Sweden it’s pretty easy, but also there’s always a struggle. I love being 40-plus old because it made things so much easier. Coming into very old structures as a young woman is… You need to be tough because it’s not going to be open arms, but as long as you have the knowledge and you work thoroughly, and not… Don’t give in to it, that’s my advice, because as long as you find your own network and know enough to do what you’re supposed to do, things usually work out when in Sweden.

Dubber      Right. Start in Sweden is your advice.

Sandra       Yeah, that’s my advice. No, but there are a lot of other countries that are as good as or even better than Sweden in many ways at… Just look into the gender question, because in Sweden it’s kind of “Yeah, we’re done.”, but we’re not, so it’s very important for us to keep working for gender equality, I’d say.

Dubber      Right. Are things getting better generally, do you think?

Sandra       I think it is, but it’s so easy… It’s just as with culture, it’s two steps ahead and one step backwards all the time, so you need to keep working and also still keep awareness on the gender factor. And this is not only men and women, it’s also, today, it’s a lot of gender-fluid, what do you say? A lot of questions, especially…

Dubber      Non-binary, I think. Yeah.

Sandra       Oh, yeah. Sorry about my English.

Dubber      No, no.

Sandra       But non-binary… In our creative fields this question is really important, and I’m sad to say that we’re far from there yet, so we need to still keep working about these things. But the thing is, sometimes… When we talk about gender equality within music, I’d say we need to take a step back and start earlier because you cannot start at the festivals where the festivals need to book… They need to check out, of course, acts, and try to keep the gender equal, but there also has to be active work done from a young age to create these kind of artists that they can book. And I’d say in Sweden these last ten years, it’s been amazing. We have so many great artists, women between 20 and 30, that really show that the Swedish system of making music and all kind of culture available, and almost for free, it’s really working, I’d say.

Dubber      Because Sweden does music education quite well at a young age, doesn’t it? Do you want to talk about what you get as a student when you’re in early schooling?

Sandra       Yeah. Within the school system everyone gets basic music education, but you can also connect to the school of culture wherever you live and then for a small amount of money you can pretty much learn any instrument. Sometimes the teachers come to school and sometimes you go to the school of culture in your city. And you can join orchestras for young, and it’s all funded so everyone can join. And I think this is very important because when you have the possibility to play the violin or produce music even though your family doesn’t have it at home, that opens doors for creativity in people that might not have that possibility before. And today, of course, a lot of the young people, they produce music at home and they have really great techniques, so today I might think it’s mostly networking, sometimes.

Dubber      Right, interesting. So for other people like you, and I guess like me, who are born audience, I had to join a band to find out that I was born audience, but what do you suggest a pathway could be for people who want to spend their lives if not being one of the creative people at least hanging out with them?

Sandra       Yeah. I’d say there are a huge need for people like us, born audience, because we need to support, try to find funding, try to enable in all ways the… Of course, there’s communications, and you know how important it is handling media. Journalism was my gateway. There are innovation, music and tech is really out there, so if you’re a tech innovator please join the music cluster. And also I’d say that there are many ways… Just look into what is your skill. If it’s economics, if it’s… The law within the music industry is really complicated. So whatever your skills and interests are, it could be event manager, it could be working with the artists in any way, from makeup to booking and agents, so, well, I’d say there are so many ways into the music industry. Or if you’re not really into the industry, there’s so much you can do in your own city to just enable people to be musicians, because we want the new music, don’t we, Andrew?

Dubber      Absolutely. And I guess that’s how you see your role, is to enable musicians in the creative and cultural communities?

Sandra       Yeah, that’s pretty much my job.

Dubber      Fantastic. Sandra, thanks so much for your time today.

Sandra       Thank you.

Dubber      That’s Sandra Wall, and that’s the MTF Podcast. I’m Andrew Dubber, you can find me @dubber. Music Tech Fest is @MusicTechFest pretty much everywhere. The MTF Podcast is out every week around this time, so hit the subscribe button and don’t forget to share, like, rate, and review. Much appreciated. Now, this week’s episode featured intro music by Stefano Mastronardi, and this is airtone you can hear in the background right now. The MTF audio logo is by Run Dreamer, and the interview this week was edited by Sergio Castillo. Have a great week, stay safe, stay local, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.

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