Bring the people who make local recordings into one room. Pay them for their knowledge. Leave with a plan the city can act on.
During the Lab, stakeholders map the people, skills, spaces, institutions, and investment that support local recording, then establish shared priorities for action.
Following the workshop, the LSRI produces a Local Recording Ecosystem Action Plan with prioritized, costed options for implementation.
Making records together gives durable form to a city’s musical relationships.
When musicians, producers, engineers, and studios work together over time, they develop shared ways of listening, timing, arranging, and making decisions. Through those repeated relationships, musical community takes shape and a regional voice becomes audible.
Music policy usually focuses on what happens after music has been made: venues, festivals, tourism, and audiences. The Recording Ecosystem Lab begins with the people, skills, rooms, and working relationships through which the music of a place is actually produced.
The Recording Ecosystem Lab is built for the people who plan and fund local music economies:
LSRI and the local host identify partners, define the question the city needs answered, and develop the stakeholder survey and Lab agenda.
LSRI facilitates a working session with the people who make and support local recordings.
LSRI combines survey findings with what was learned in the Lab to identify local strengths, gaps, and shared priorities.
The host receives a Local Recording Ecosystem Action Plan with costed options, potential partners, and the decisions required to move forward.
Participant stipends, venue, travel, accessibility, and other local costs are scoped with the host and identified in the engagement budget.
The Local Recording Ecosystem Action Plan gives the host a locally grounded basis for investment and implementation decisions.
A music census surveys the whole music scene, the musicians, venues, and audiences across a city. The Recording Ecosystem Lab looks at one part of that scene in depth: how recordings actually get made where you live. It maps the studios, engineers, producers, players, and the skills and spaces that turn a local performance into a finished recording.
A city can run the Lab on its own, or alongside a broader music census to go deeper on the recording economy specifically.
A city can build recording capacity collectively rather than duplicate it one bedroom at a time.
Shared studios, equipment, repair capacity, and local production resources may reduce repeated purchases, shipping, packaging, and waste. The Lab identifies where collective investment could make local recording infrastructure more affordable, useful, and resource-efficient.
The Lab is led by Jeffrey Anthony, founder and director of the Musical Form Institute. He brings 25 years of experience as a touring and session musician, record producer, and studio owner, along with an MPA and graduate training in collaborative governance.
As Economic Competitiveness Officer for the City of Tucson, he served as project manager for the city’s successful $500,000 Phase 1 application to the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge. He managed the regional planning process that brought municipalities, educational institutions, economic-development organizations, industry partners, and community organizations together to develop a coordinated strategy for climate adaptation and economic resilience across Southern Arizona.
He also created and led a supplier-diversity anchor procurement initiative designed to redirect institutional spending toward local businesses. The project and his approach to community wealth building were featured by the National League of Cities.
He developed the Recording Ecosystem Lab to apply this combination of recording-sector knowledge, collaborative planning, and regional economic-development experience to the infrastructure through which local music is made.
LSRI is seeking a city, regional organization, or multi-partner coalition to host the first Recording Ecosystem Lab. The engagement will be shaped around the partner’s local question, stakeholders, and investment context.
Start with a 30-minute conversation about local fit, partners, scope, and funding.
Jeffrey Anthony on how gear culture, sold as democratization, funnels money to manufacturers and carries real environmental costs while homogenizing how music gets made.
Read the article →
Jeffrey Anthony argues that when recordings scrub out the natural imprecision of human performance, we lose one of the last symbolic forms that teaches us how to inhabit time together, with consequences for our shared civic life.
Read the article →Metronome photo: Paco from Badajoz, España, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.