While at SXSW, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sigtryggur Baldursson, aka Siggi, the Managing Director of the Icelandic Music Export Office in Reykjavík, to talk about the Icelandic music industry in post-recession, how music helps the economy, what bands like Of Monsters and Men do for the industry and what role his office (who are the Icelandic equivalent of Sounds Australia) plays. And a fun fact: Siggi was the drummer in The Sugarcubes and you may have seen him backing Emiliana Torrini in recent years! This is a fascinating chat, read on!
What is the role of your office?
The Icelandic music export office was established in 2007, and I was on the board for it, along with a few others. The thing is, in Iceland, you don’t have many people with the experience of exporting music out of the country. You do have bands like Björk and The Sugarcubes before that, though, who were my band. And then Sigur Ros came later of course.
I was asked to take over the managing director role of the office a year ago. The managing director went to do a project called NOMEX, which is a little office that co-ordinates the efforts of the Nordic Music Scene. These music export offices operate largely as information agencies. Which is a cool little function. They lubricate the wheels of commerce by exchanging information. It’s not easily measured, but we’ve had a ridiculous increase in the export of Icelandic music over the last three years.
Of Monsters and Men must have been a part of this. They have had huge success especially in Australia.
Yes, in the States… it started there, then went to Europe and Australia. They are very well known all around the world. I don’t have any exact figures, but they are doing well. But having said that, there are a lot of other bands who are doing quite well for themselves on a different level. They’re actually managing to get their music out of the country, set up a career for themselves, tour and sell records, even though no one may be hearing about them in the same way that they hear about Of Monsters and Men. But these little things are very important, because they are the norm. Of Monsters and Men are the exception.
The rule you want to have with these processes is that you want bands/musicians/artists to create a career for themselves. This strengthens the economy and all that… it’s all part of the bigger picture. That’s what an office like this is in a business sense. It’s more about that, than about having that one hit artist. The hits are good, they do put a reflection on the country and its music. But it’s not really what we’re about or what we’re striving for.
When I started, we set up a counter, which counted gigs that Icelandic bands were playing abroad. The “giger” counter. We counted 73 gigs in the month of June 2012. We thought that was pretty good. And it’s very up and down. But in March 2013, we had 203 gigs with Icelandic bands abroad in one month. A lot of the stars aligned in that a lot of our stars were gigging… Björk, Of Monsters and Men and Sigur Ros… and the lesser knowns, and semi-stars were as well.
SXSW and Canadian Music Week must help, too
Yes, we had three bands play here yesterday. There are two other artists, too, who didn’t participate in that showcase. And we even had our Symphony Orchestra performing at the Kennedy Center. So we counted that as well.
That would have been an amazing show!
It’s your regular Symphony show really! They were playing some interesting new Icelandic music, they were also playing a big piano concerto and a new Icelandic export called Maximus Musicus, which is a small mouse called Maximus, who is introducing the music to the kids. It’s an interesting project that we’ve had some involvement in.
The office is basically set up in response to a lot of interest abroad in what we’d call the “indie” side of Icelandic music. But it also bleeds across into other sectors. Among the 200 bands playing abroad in the month of March are Jazz Bands, the Symphony, some metal bands are on tour. A whole array of stuff across the board. This is quite an anomaly… but none the less, it crystalises what the export office wants people to do.
It wants people to export. Export is playing gigs abroad, and getting paid for it in foreign currency. Things are pretty bright up there now, after the bank crash. The arts have come out of the recession in Iceland really well. And that’s in part because the arts are used to operating on no budget. And they’re doing something which is the core of what good start up businesses do. They create something from nothing and they take it to market, and they invest in it themselves. This is the core picture of what a good band or artist does.
So what I’ve been pointing out to the government is that music is good business. Because it’s creating stuff from nothing. It’s a poignant thing. Not only music, but the creative sector in general. So the Icelandic Government finally has an investment plan in place, where they are investing in the creative arts, in the form of new funds that are actually feeding grants into the system. The catch-22 of that, though, is that we’ve been doing well without the grants. So you have to ask yourself if this is going to jinx the good vibe which is happening. And my answer to that is no, not necessarily, not if you let the money filter into the grass roots, instead of setting up a government agency that is pro control of that. But it’s an interesting experiment, so we’ll see where it goes. My intuition is to keep the export office quite hidden from the market. I don’t want them to interfere with the market, because it’s been doing well for the Icelandic music scene so far. I think part of what is helping us out, as well, is that we’re a very DIY country, so there’s not a lot of interference.
We don’t have the normal hierarchy of the music business. The normal layering of booking agents and management etc. that you’ll find elsewhere. Artists are used to recording things themselves, or knowing someone who can do it for them, and then calling up their friend at a radio station to play their song. And then calling a venue and booking a gig and doing it. The positive side of this, is that artists in general have a pretty good understanding of what a booking agent does, how management works, how PR/radio pluggers would work.
When bands do leave the country, do they get into any trouble having such a DIY mindset?
Yes, sometimes they do. Part of our problem is that we don’t have this layer of international business. So they’re doing a lot of this out of their own good will and wits. One of the things we’re working on now, is that we’re doing a European Educational Grant, where we sent a couple of young managers to intern with management agencies in Europe. We’re trying to create a layer of better international management, in order to keep more of our business in Iceland. When a band gets big, they usually take their business out of Iceland – they get an international publishing deal and a manager out of the UK, and maybe they have a salary that lets them spend money in Iceland; buy a house or whatever it might be. But the core of their business will be somewhere else.
In the future we’re hoping to slowly change this. There is so much healthy music coming out of Iceland right now that it is tempting to start thinking more along these lines.
Has your time with a band like The Sugarcubes helped provide you with a certain… instinct as to the direction things should go?
Yes and no. I mean the operation of the export office like this are a little bit different. Let’s put it this way. It’s been a huge learning curve for me this last year, and leading up to taking over the office. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really part of the business side of things with The Sugarcubes. I was a pretty shitty business thinking musician. I’m the first to admit that. But that also means that I come into this knowing where a lot of musicians are coming from. And it also makes me understand and believe that we really need to strengthen the managemental layer of the Icelandic music scene. We need people to help the artists who can’t help themselves. That’s been a helpful thing to realise.
The good thing about being a musician myself, too, is that musicians can relate to me better, than someone who comes from the business side of things. So I have better access to them.
Looking into the year ahead, what are the big objectives for the export office?
We’re actually looking at getting an export fund up and running. Hopefully around Easter, it will be operational. It’s a small fund to begin with, mostly for travel grants, so bands can apply for then. But bi-monthly I want that fund to grow into things like PR, and bigger, strategic thinking. I want to see that happening at a bigger scale – I don’t want this to be something where we hit and hope, as they say in golf; I want us to work on our swing and think about it before we hit the ball. Our strength is that we’re really good at improvising in Iceland, but it’s not always the right way to go. We need to think ahead a year or two or more…
This industry is a funny beast. It’s in such constant transition. But I’m sure mixing government with music can work. I’ve heard of the good things happening with the export office in Australia (Sounds Australia), and I’m hooking up some devious schemes – high concept, low budget – to help promote Icelandic music in the year ahead.
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Learn more about what Siggi and his team get up to here: http://www.icelandmusic.is/
