photo by: Contributed/Photo by Shawn Brackbill

The Lawrence Music Alliance's Mixmaster Music Conference held in September at the Lawrence Public Library. Nick Carswell (center), the group's president, said the alliance works to connect everyone in the music industry to help them give them tools to thrive.

There’s always plenty to listen to in Lawrence’s music scene, but if you ask Nick Carswell, local musicians really need to press pause and listen to each other.

Carswell is the leader of the Lawrence Music Alliance, and he’s been working with the City of Lawrence and other local stakeholders over the past year to really listen to the city’s musicians — their concerns, their demographics, what kinds of work they do. What he’s heard so far is that local musicians are disconnected — from each other and from the resources they need to grow their careers — and they could really benefit from more opportunities to network and learn together.

“There is quite a bit of disconnect,” said Carswell, himself a member of a local band. “To carve out time to connect and learn from each other is a big strategy.”

That’s why the Lawrence Music Alliance has been promoting this month as Music Business Month — a time when musicians can attend drop-in sessions with event promoters and venue operators, get information about grants and resources, even get help on how to do their taxes.

It’s important to have these resources on the business side of music, because recent data about the city’s music scene shows that many musicians in Lawrence are struggling financially and aren’t able to support themselves on their art alone. That’s according to the Lawrence Music Census, a survey of the local scene that Carswell’s group worked with the city’s arts and culture staff and other stakeholders to complete last year.

Now that it’s clearer than ever who Lawrence’s musicians are and what they need, Carswell said the Lawrence Music Alliance is now ready to take bigger steps to support artists and make sure Lawrence stays a hub of arts and culture.

“We’re hitting the ground running,” Carswell said.

Taking a music census

It’s a common refrain that Lawrence is a live music hub. But to really understand how to help the industry thrive, Carswell and local arts leaders like Porter Arneill, the city’s director of arts and culture, needed more than just common knowledge. They needed hard data.

“We know that we’re a music town, but what does that mean?” Arneill said in 2024, when the Lawrence Music Census was being organized. “Who’s represented in that, who’s active in that, all of those questions that we really just don’t have (answers to).”

The census, which was taken in the spring of 2024 and got more than 800 respondents, provided a lot of answers.

The survey asked about demographics like age, race, ethnicity and gender; types of occupations; socioeconomic status; and concerns that people had about the industry and their careers. It was open to anyone 18 or older in the Lawrence and Douglas County area involved in the music industry, regardless of compensation or job type.

According to Arneill, “The Music Census is an important tool to help us understand the current state of our music ecosystem and identify opportunities to both nurture and leverage it in a sustainable and inclusive way.”

So, what is the state of that “music ecosystem?” One way of looking at it is as a multimillion-dollar industry — and as a key piece of an even bigger local tourism and recreation economy.

When you total up all respondents in the Lawrence Music Census, music generates about $13 million in income for them each year. And Allison Calvin, the director of marketing and communications for the convention and visitors bureau Explore Lawrence, says live music is a “powerful driving factor” for bringing visitors to the city. The most recent Lawrence tourism data available, from 2023, showed that visitors spent a total of $296 million in Douglas County that year, and $40 million of that was spent on recreation and entertainment.

But the other way of looking at Lawrence’s music scene is as an industry full of amateurs, freelancers and part-timers who make an average of just $16,000 per year from music.

Of the survey’s 826 respondents, more than two thirds — 68% — said they had other employment outside of the music industry, and 87% of those people said their non-music employment was their primary source of income. More than a fifth of respondents — 21% — aren’t paid for their music-related work at all.

Many of these music industry participants expressed concerns about their financial situation. Two-thirds of them said they were concerned about the rising cost of living, and 63% worried about stagnant pay.

Building careers

It’s no surprise, then, that much of the Lawrence Music Alliance’s work is focused on helping creatives turn their music into a more sustainable career.

The Music Business Month programming has included a “Weekly Music Business Helpdesk” every Wednesday at the Lawrence Public Library, where people can drop in and chat with event organizers from venues like The Granada or production companies like Mammoth Productions. This past week, there was an entrepreneurship round table, and on March 31 there’s even a discussion about how taxes work for self-employed creatives.

One program the Lawrence Music Alliance is looking to pilot is a workshop that will help musicians learn how to pitch themselves to venues. Being able to provide immediate feedback of what makes an act stand out helps give musicians ideas of best practices that can help them get more opportunities going forward, Carswell said.

And there are plenty of gigs to apply for. The music census found that the various promoters and venues hosted more than 6,500 events each year across the city, and the Lawrence Music Alliance has become something of a community resource for people looking for musicians to perform, including for city-organized events like the annual Summerfest celebration.

Another way that the Lawrence Music Alliance has been a direct help to the local scene has been through connecting artists to grants. Some are bigger national programs, like ones that helped venues like the Granada and the Bottleneck host interns, while others are much more local. But all of them are important for the group to seek out, Carswell said.

“There are many different programs that musicians and venues have been able to plug into thanks to our connectivity,” Carswell said.

One grant program in particular got some attention from the LMA. The City of Lawrence is offering a mini-grant program for artists, which wrapped up its application period earlier this month and will provide grants of up to $500 to help creators cover start-up costs for their equipment. Carswell said the group organized workshops with the city to help applicants strengthen their grant applications and make them more likely to receive funds.

Carswell said the relationships the Lawrence Music Alliance has formed with the city and its other partners have been important for its growth. The fact that the city is so supportive of the organization, Carswell said, is “inspir(ing) other organizations to join the effort,” because they can see the buy-in that the city is providing.

Explore Lawrence is one of the other organizations interested in helping local musicians out. Calvin said the organization markets live music events all year long with a calendar on its website and also has a monthly music blog that it uses to help highlight local artists. It’s publicized both locally and to the tourism bureau’s target markets.

Calvin said the Lawrence Music Alliance is a great partner and resource that is “a great contributor to a thriving music scene.”

Although support from the city and other partners is important, Carswell said the biggest part of the Lawrence Music Alliance’s work is better connecting its members so they can thrive. Much of the Music Business Month programming, Carswell said, was tailored to needs identified through the Music Census to give them that professional support and business help they needed. And he said the organization, which formed in 2023, is just getting started.

“Sometimes it’s hard to see where the impact is, but we know there have been positive outcomes that directly benefit members, venues and the industry,” Carswell said.