We seeing an alarming progression around export offices, especially in Europe. Before the artists that were presented from the export offices were mainly export-ready. With so many new export offices that have come on with small countries that clearly don’t have the capacity to even have one artist export ready the quality has sunken severely. It’s interesting to see the organizations that should make things be enabled just now destroying any chance an artist has.

A big problem is that a majority of people working in the offices actually don’t have a serious background in the industry. Either they have work for support organizations or inside genres that are not export-ready or just low down in the chain of command. The overall knowledge is very low in the major part of the offices. The problem then becomes that when many export offices talk about export readiness without even understanding what it is. Most of the time we find much more suitable artists in their countries but then get attacked since we choose outside their own systems. Or they are just choosing a local artist that is way too early to even deal with.

I have now visited over 40 showcase festivals in the last two years and raised questions with people who actually handle the artists who are on the way up to higher positions. They totally agree on this problem, and it affects the showcases in a negative way. Many of them have stopped going to showcase since they know the supply of artists now comes from the export offices and has such a low quality that they are not export-ready. In several cases, they didn’t go to a certain festival because it was occupied with too many export offices and the effect is that you have so many sellers but no buyers. This has led to several bigger showcases that don’t provide enough, they mainly contain organizations, export offices, or EU politicians. None of these can help a new act that invests time and money to go there.

The problem is that mainly the export offices are in the hands of organizations. These organizations have no export readiness at all. Instead, they use their contacts at the export offices to bring in their artist to proclaim success stories that are not there. Just because you play on a bigger showcase festival it doesn’t mean any export. Also, these organizations are in a very distinct local area and very fast drained of talent and it becomes too low quality to even work with. Also, with the artist comes very much low local industry that is not suitable to be out on the export field. In the end, we see that the showcase festival is adept to it and the panels are mainly hitting subjects that are made for artist who are not export ready and their entourage. The pros of the industry stop showing up or find ways to lock them away from the general crowd. 

This has led to even threats to the showcase festivals to bring certain countries that have a reputation for having really low quality. Several people can only think of coming as speakers or VIPs:s if we can provide them with escape routes to be able to skip these countries. In several cases, we had to drop artists from certain countries since speakers suspected that they were part of an export office program.

It has gone so far that several attempts are now just to exclude export offices on gatherings that will only hold professionals and the artist comes from professional networks. Several sponsors have make the conclusion that showcase festivals are for totally beginners and ask for a platform where the level can be higher and more international.