Impact, Unpacked: Music Export Between Numbers and Stories

Understanding the impact of music export development is a real need—not just to prove results, but to know what can actually be learned and how that can guide effective action. It matters for artists' careers and businesses, and by extension for policymaking around national and regional music ecosystems. This panel starts with a short presentation laying out three ways to look at impact: national export figures, individual case studies of success, and the activities behind export development. From there, the conversation continues on what data can realistically tell us and what it can't. It touches on the age-old problem of attribution—how much of any success can be traced back to a specific action or decision—and how far we can generalise from one unique case to inform export development more broadly.