by Tom Benton

The Austin Music Network

Wake up in any other major city in America, turn on the television, and your musical entertainment options are most likely limited to two: MTV and VH1, both owned by media giant Viacom and seemingly excising actual musical content by the day. At the moment of this writing, it's group showers on MTV's The Real World (id-fueled young people in an apartment), followed by Road Rules (id-fueled young people in a Winnebago), followed by professional wrestling. Some cable subscribers may find Canada's MuchMusic available, which is more generous in its weight towards music programming yet still devotes this time to the same pool of musical commodities as its American counterparts.

But in Austin, turn to Cable Channel 15 and you might catch a live performance by Soulhat or the Golden Arm Trio, a local hip-hop video or a profile on the Texas gospel dynasty Mighty Bells of Joy. You'll also find videos and live footage of national acts, but overwhelmingly, the Austin Music Network (AMN) adheres to its original mission plan of supporting the Austin music industry through the promotion of local, homegrown talent.

It's been a strange, rocky road for the AMN, which started in 1994 as a city project promoting the Austin music scene. Management was soon passed from the city to the private Music Management Group, who enabled the station to exist, for a time, as a commercial, self-sustaining entity. But arguments and discontent over content and inadequate fund raising activity (including at least one Austin band's calling for the network's demolition in song) reached a fevered pitch, and the Austin Music Commission (AMC), the network's advisory body, placed the management of the station back into non-profit hands.

Under the umbrella of the Kenneth Threadgill Musical Project and managed by Woody Roberts, the network, in this incarnation, had the promise of being a legitimate independent nonprofit organization rather than a city project or a commercial body. Yet, surviving on a limited budget and mostly borrowed equipment, it has been plagued by several bouts of unannounced dead air and a debatably unpopular reorganization of programming.

And though Roberts' plans to foster a stronger alignment with the Austin dot-com scene (as well as to broadcast on the Internet by March 2001) have not yet come to fruition, now at least the station has found its way to calmer waters, booking and broadcasting local acts known and unknown. For example, for a week of planned downtime in February, the station only broadcast psychedelic video art and music during a major refitting of its control room, hopefully a sign of better things to come.

The Austin Music Commission

The Austin Music Commission (AMC) is a volunteer advisory board of local musicians, promoters and other citizens with a deep commitment to the welfare of the Austin live music community. Like other city commissions, the AMC can provide recommendations to the City Council. However, the AMC is unique from other commissions in that it has a small budget which is earmarked primarily for the promotion of the city as a vacation or business convention destination. Nevertheless, the AMC has been responsible for the creation of the LINKS program, getting second hand musical instruments into the hands of children and initiating the Music Industry Loan Guarantee Program, which helps to provide small business loans to members of the music community.

The AMC's most recent and potentially most impacting project, however, is its completion of a study requested by the City Council that intricately details the economic impact of the music scene on the local economy. Unveiled in October of 2001, the findings put the music industry's contribution to the city's economy in 2000 at $616 million, which places the music industry within the top ten revenue-generating industries in the city, creating 11,200 jobs and $11 million in city tax revenue. To many, especially those who remember the Austin that claimed the title of "Live Music Capitol of the World," these numbers were hardly surprising.

However, these same parties have been able to isolate some of the problems with the local music industry, the most notable one being that the abundance of local musicians has turned Austin into a buyer's market for music. Given the sheer number of acts hoping to play on any given night of the week, club owners are able to pay musicians much less than ever before; consequently, the chances that your favorite Austin musician actually makes a living wage playing music is slim. Of course, this problem is closely related to the increasing financial pressure caused by the influx of high-tech presence into the city, which has upped rents and other standard of living or upkeep costs for both venues and musicians. And perhaps most controversially, the interaction between the music venues and the city government (including law enforcement) has been highly strained at times over issues ranging from noise ordinances to occupancy codes to parking downtown.

And though the national nightlife industry on the whole has suffered an overwhelming downturn since the September, the AMC continues to promote their study's findings. Their numbers should hopefully offer the government and the larger business community some evidence that the Austin music industry is worthy of investment and, in short, financial respect. In addition, they have proposed that economic development assistance be provided for live music venues, that further opportunities be created for local musical talent and that a mediation process between the music scene and local regulatory agencies be established.

The Austin Music Commission meets on the second Tuesday of the month at Threadgill's restaurant on North Lamar. To join them, to contact a commission member or to simply share your thoughts on what one still hopes is "The Live Music Capital of the World," check out www.ci.austin.tx.us/musicom. In the meantime, go hear some bands.