HEartS Policy is led by the Centre for Performance Science, a partnership of the Royal College of Music and Imperial College London. It leverages the knowledge produced during two previous AHRC funded projects; The Health, Economic and Social impact of the ARTs (HEartS) project (AHRC 2018-21, AH/P005888/1), and HEartS Professional (AHRC 2019-22, AH/V013874/1), alongside the key industry partners. Three work packages (WPs) are themed around different findings, with tailored insights of our findings adapted to the needs of different audiences. WP1, Everyday HEarts: WP1 will comprise the development of a series of short, animated films targeting a public audience, highlighting key research findings on how arts and cultural engagement supports health and wellbeing, focused on the outcomes of HEartS. 90 second 'bitesize' animated films will give the lay public a direct and accessible route through which they can engage with knowledge that will enable them to enhance their practises to best support health and wellbeing. These animations will be complemented by a research report and educational resource pack, highlighting the key findings of the HEartS research. Using the same themes as the animated films, this pack will be oriented towards educators and aimed at integrating HEartS findings within personal, social, and health education. A primary objective of this resource is to support the use of the animations within schools as a tool for communicating the value of the arts for mental health and quality of life. WP2, HEartS in Health and Practice: WP2 will comprise the development of a podcast series (comprised of eight, thirty-minute episodes) split into two parts: WP2a, HEartS for Health and WP2b, HEartS in Practice. These podcasts will consist of researchers and practitioners in conversation with (i) health and clinical workers (such as GPs, mental health and community practitioners) exploring how HEartS practices can be more effectively implemented in practice, and (ii) discussion on the health of creative professionals, drawing more explicitly on the findings of HEartS Professional. Both sets of podcasts will be accompanied by policy briefs targeting both government but also organisational and educational policy. WP3, HEartS Summit: WP3 will develop a lasting impact for the findings of HEartS through the HEartS Summit. This two-day event brings together our project partners and other relevant stakeholders to (a) explore the interlinked outcomes of creative health and the future health of the creative workforce, and (b) collaboratively develop strategies for action that will cement project findings within policy and practice. This project will serve to maximise the impact of HEartS and HEartS Professional, extending its findings to both more diverse and targeted audiences, and through exchange with our knowledge partners extending well beyond unidirectional dissemination activity. Our work packages seek to maximise the accessibility of our research insights, and with the close collaboration of our partners, to enhance the social, economic and policy impact of the work beyond the lifespan of the project. In particular, tailored activities within each of the work packages will ensure that key messages are not just shared but presented alongside strategies to support long term change. Overall, the distinctive interlinked perspective of HEartS Follow On, combining the future of creative health alongside the health of creative professionals, will both build pathways for the integration of creative health into education, policy, and artistic practice, while also enhancing the sustainability and flourishing of the arts and cultural industries.

Live music is a prime illustration of wider issues in the UK's cultural sector. Pressure on the public purse, nationally and locally, is felt from larger institutions - orchestras, opera companies, etc.- to the grassroots as direct funding dries up due to cuts. Meanwhile, live music has overtaken recorded sector revenues since 2008. Major events sell-out in hours and, as lobbying group UK Music's recent report on music tourism shows, the live sector is a significant source of income for the nation. Yet the benefits are felt unevenly, and not simply as a matter of suffering state subsidised arts and a healthy commercial sector. Growing concern for the fate of venues at the lower level of the economic activity is reflected in media and industry reports of struggles and closure. Neither is this just recession based. The key piece of music related legislation in recent times - the Live Music Act 2012 - deregulated the provision of live music of all kinds in licensed premises. But it was the result of a long campaign by industry, grassroots and legislators that arose from the negative impact of earlier licensing legislation in 2003 on venues and practitioners. Calls for more deregulation also involve both industry (UK Music) and musicians' (the Musicians' Union) representatives. Neither are music venues alone in their predicament. Questions of how to support culture hinge on assessments of how to value it - for economic benefit or innate social worth - and intersect with those about the role of the state and private vs public investment. Opposing speeches by UK Culture Secretary Maria Miller and Scottish Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop have starkly illustrated the lines between economic and intrinsic values as cases for investment. Implicit in wider debates and those around live music is a sense that different points on the scale of activity are interdependent. Today's stadium acts started in the pubs and local hotspots that are now struggling - in other words, an ecological model. Again, private and public sector inputs are not discrete but interdependent. Transport infrastructure, sensitive or draconian local licensing regimes, zoning and health and safety policies all affect local live music ecologies just as do direct investment from state, municipality or commerce. We will shed light on such interactions - the funding ecology - by examining them in context and practice in three case-study localities across the UK - the London Borough of Camden, Leeds and Glasgow. We will work with three key sector groups: PRS for Music, who license venues' use of copyright compositions, will provide data allowing us to map the size and types of venue in each area. With UK Music and the Musicians' Union (MU), we will then select case studies of venue capacities in six categories: Small (Under 200 capacity); Small-Medium (200-500); Medium (500-2,000); Medium-Large (2,000-5,000); Large (5,000-20,000); Very Large (20,000+). Interviews with local and national policy makers, council officers, regional MU representatives, and venue operators will, along with the mapping exercise, show how the interplay of regulation, finance, ownership and management structures produce and reflect conceptions of cultural value in theory and in practice across the live music venue ecology. The ecological model of music venues in the context of investment and stakeholder activity will both broaden and sharpen our understanding of the sector. It will account for the narratives of public and private actors in shaping the environment in which musical careers proceed as an interdependent system of different levels of economic activity. The effects of local and national regulation, alongside various forms of direct subsidy and indirect support (or hindrance), are felt in ways both obvious and hidden. We will illuminate this system to provide insights into live music, and cultural activity at large, for policy makers, industry and practitioners alike.

Live music is popular across the UK, and has become increasingly important to the music industries, overtaking recording revenues in 2008. Yet recent years have been difficult for venues. These challenges are felt particularly keenly by the smaller venues, clubs and pubs which provide for local musicians and audiences, and which serve as the training ground for future headline acts. There is widespread interest in the live music sector, and there have been numerous reports assessing its value produced by industry organisations, policy bodies and the third sector. Nevertheless, there is still a knowledge gap about the specific relationship between the value of live music on the one hand and current challenges facing venues across the UK on the other. Accounts of live music activity vary according to where they have been produced and according to which type of policy, industry or academic research has provided them. For instance, reports by The Scottish Household Survey, City of Edinburgh Council, Department of Media Culture and Sport, as well as those that industry bodies have commissioned, use both different definitions and parameters for what counts as live music activity. They often conflate live music with other performance activities (like theatre) or musical sources of revenue (like recording or publishing). This variation can make it difficult to make meaningful comparisons across cities, and between different types of music. It also means that the full range of settings in which live music takes place is not always properly captured by work which has a specific industry or policy focus. Our project will address these issues directly. The Great British Live Music Census will be a collaboration between music industry organisations, policy bodies and leading academic live music researchers. Working with key personnel in the live music sector, and building on the project team's pilot study of a census of live music in Edinburgh, we will provide the first account of live music in the UK that covers the full range of venues and that includes all types of musical activity - from amateur to top-flight professional. In conjunction with industry personnel and policymakers, our team will develop a toolkit for conducting a snapshot census of live music in three cities (Glasgow, Newcastle and Oxford) and share it with other institutions so that they can conduct parallel snapshots across the country. With project partners UK Music, the Musicians' Union and the Music Venue Trust, we will also survey musicians, venues and audience members nationwide to provide the most comprehensive dataset yet of live music in the country. Our prior research shows that different local government responses to cultural activity and venue licensing can have a profound effect on live music provision, but also that it is difficult for policymakers to make informed decisions given the variety of different definitions and parameters used in the available evidence. By bringing together industry bodies, policymakers and academics to formulate the questions and promote the surveys, this project will assist researchers, policymakers and industry alike, providing consensus on an academically rigorous methodology and subsequent dataset for assessing the scope and value of live music in the UK. This will be a large step forward for all concerned in working to safeguard and develop the cultural and economic wellbeing of this most valuable component of local character in cities and localities across the country.

Live music is popular across the UK, and has become increasingly important to the music industries, overtaking recording revenues in 2008. Yet recent years have been difficult for venues. These challenges are felt particularly keenly by the smaller venues, clubs and pubs which provide for local musicians and audiences, and which serve as the training ground for future headline acts. There is widespread interest in the live music sector, and there have been numerous reports assessing its value produced by industry organisations, policy bodies and the third sector. Nevertheless, there is still a knowledge gap about the specific relationship between the value of live music on the one hand and current challenges facing venues across the UK on the other. Accounts of live music activity vary according to where they have been produced and according to which type of policy, industry or academic research has provided them. For instance, reports by The Scottish Household Survey, City of Edinburgh Council, Department of Media Culture and Sport, as well as those that industry bodies have commissioned, use both different definitions and parameters for what counts as live music activity. They often conflate live music with other performance activities (like theatre) or musical sources of revenue (like recording or publishing). This variation can make it difficult to make meaningful comparisons across cities, and between different types of music. It also means that the full range of settings in which live music takes place is not always properly captured by work which has a specific industry or policy focus. Our project will address these issues directly. The Great British Live Music Census will be a collaboration between music industry organisations, policy bodies and leading academic live music researchers. Working with key personnel in the live music sector, and building on the project team's pilot study of a census of live music in Edinburgh, we will provide the first account of live music in the UK that covers the full range of venues and that includes all types of musical activity - from amateur to top-flight professional. In conjunction with industry personnel and policymakers, our team will develop a toolkit for conducting a snapshot census of live music in three cities (Glasgow, Newcastle and Oxford) and share it with other institutions so that they can conduct parallel snapshots across the country. With project partners UK Music, the Musicians' Union and the Music Venue Trust, we will also survey musicians, venues and audience members nationwide to provide the most comprehensive dataset yet of live music in the country. Our prior research shows that different local government responses to cultural activity and venue licensing can have a profound effect on live music provision, but also that it is difficult for policymakers to make informed decisions given the variety of different definitions and parameters used in the available evidence. By bringing together industry bodies, policymakers and academics to formulate the questions and promote the surveys, this project will assist researchers, policymakers and industry alike, providing consensus on an academically rigorous methodology and subsequent dataset for assessing the scope and value of live music in the UK. This will be a large step forward for all concerned in working to safeguard and develop the cultural and economic wellbeing of this most valuable component of local character in cities and localities across the country.

Generative AI (GenAI) burst into the popular imagination in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT - a chat agent that has proven not only to be very popular but also signifies a major leap forward in technological capabilities. ChatGPT is just one of several GenAI technologies that has entered the scene in recent years; others can generate (or alter) video, images, music, dialogue, and computer code. These developments have the potential to change the nature of work for many, including for workers previously deemed immune to direct competition from technology. There is urgency to studying the impact of these tools in the specific context of creative work, in which technologically-mediated worker precarity is an ongoing but increasingly acute concern. Worker resistance, as exemplified by recent industrial action by the Writers Guild of America, highlights that impacts go beyond 'displacement' of or access to work, and can impact established notions of authorship while also affecting worker discretion and dignity. The creative sector is at the coalface of the GenAI transformation in which emerging technologies potentially devalue labour materially (wages) and socially (recognition of contribution). Our understanding of the transformative effects of GenAI in creative work is still emerging but present; the experience and perspective of those whose lives and livelihoods are increasingly threatened by these new technologies have not been properly factored into AI policy planning and change. What is needed is to bring these perspectives into view where they can influence labour policy in the area of data-driven technologies. To achieve this requires the building of new architectures that bridge this divide between experience and application and which promote involvement by building on the strength of UK labour law, comparable historical precedents like Scandinavian participatory design, and recent turns toward participatory algorithmic impact assessments. Algorithmic impact assessments hold promise as accountability tools that can surface core concerns about the effects of data-driven technologies while pointing towards governance strategies for mitigating those concerns. Where impact assessments are designed to foreground the voices of people affected by emerging technologies, they can also serve as frameworks for surfacing and crystalising perspectives that reflect the lived experience of technology-mediated lives, which in turn can be channelled into policy guidance. In this project, we bring together two leading and relevant methods of impact assessment: the Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law Assurance Framework for AI Systems (HUDERIA), and the Good Work Algorithmic Impact Assessment (GWAIA). The GWAIA has been selected as a focal point because of its specific application to questions of worker dignity. Its current design is relevant to algorithmic management tools within a 'conventional' employment context. We will cross-reference this with insights from HUDERIA, which brings specific insights with regards to structuring accountability in the relationship between individuals and technology producers, public and private. A central feature these tools share is the participatory engagement model of surfacing, assessing, and mitigating individual and collective risks to workers by drawing on the experiences, testimony, and ideas of workers themselves.