Today is Tuesday, June 30th, and in this twenty-sixth episode I’d like to share with you some commercial reflections.
Today’s question is:
What kind of market is there for those who do music therapy?
Thirty years ago, when I first approached this profession, the questions were different:
“What model of music therapy do you use?”
“Does music therapy work?”
And things like that.
Today, whether we like it or not, we are forced to ask ourselves questions that are a little more brutal, less philosophical, and less connected to the discipline as such, but rather to its real sellability.
Questions such as:
What are we selling?
Is what we sell actually in demand?
And if it is, what need does it respond to?
Is our product unique?
If so, what makes us unique?
Is there anything that only we do?
What is our market?
The public sector?
The private sector?
Home-based work?
The social field?
The territory, the square, the classroom, the company?
Who is our buyer, and what purchasing power do they have?
Who are our competitors on the market, and what do they offer that is more, or better, than what we offer?
What strategies do we use to differentiate ourselves from the competition?
Are we competitive in terms of price?
Are we able to sell ourselves?
What sales strategy do we put in place?
In what product category can we place ourselves, if we analyse what we actually do?
Are we a boutique or a supermarket?
Street vendors or permanently established?
A blend or a single malt?
Craftsperson or large-scale distribution?
And in this process of commercialisation — where name, image, and brand matter as much as water does to a fish — how much has the term music therapy helped us, or hindered us?
First: we are not a pharmaceutical company, so what we produce does not fall within the category of therapies in the classical sense.
Second: we do not offer musical psychotherapy either, unless we are already psychotherapists who decide to use music as an additional element within our practice.
Third: we are not researchers, unless we are one of those six or seven PhD holders doing doctoral research on “music and neuroscience”, which is something different from “music therapy”.
Fourth: let us also remember that what we produce is often far from belonging to the aesthetic category indicated by the word music.
So we are also outside the family of “musicians”.
Fifth: perhaps there is a space for us in the rehabilitative, habilitative, and preventive fields.
I was about to add educational and recreational fields too, but if I use the word education or recreation, the whole purist crowd turns against me.
The crowd of trainers, or aspiring trainers.
Those who, strictly speaking, are not working in the field — and therefore, logically, would be unemployed — but who nevertheless have enormous listening power when it comes to determining the life or death of one label rather than another.
Never use the word recreation.
Never use the word recreation, I recommend it.
Otherwise you will be excommunicated and kindly included in the category of:
“Good, yes, but doing music therapy is something else.”
And on this “Good, yes, but doing music therapy is something else”, I’ll stop.
We’ll meet again on Tuesday, July 7th, with a new episode of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy.