Come Play With Me (CPWM) is a non-profit, CIC (Community Interest Company), music development organisation specialising in supporting people from marginalised communities. The award-winning organisation works with talent across the Yorkshire region, including musicians, sound engineers, promoters, photographers, writers, and event programmers, to develop their skills and networks. Through its various projects and programmes, CPWM aims to create and sustain a more equitable creative industry.
We interviewed Tony Ereira, CEO and Founder of Come Play With Me, to learn more about CPWM's main EDI drivers and how these inform the wider company strategy. We also find out more about the Come Platform Me programme, which is designed to support engineers and promoters from marginalised backgrounds in furthering their careers in the live music industry.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion within your organisation?
The key reasons are that there is a lack of opportunity for lots of people to pursue music careers if they have any protected characteristics at all - crudely, if they're not a straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied man. I think it's exacerbated within the music industry because there is actually some really good diversity when you look at the musicians at the front. So, what people see on TV and what people hear on Spotify, there's perfectly good diversity there. However, that's not true across the rest of the industry.
I came into music quite late, only around 13 years ago. I set up a commercial record label and I kept meeting lots of young people who were telling me about the challenges they faced. It's really hard for everybody, whoever you are, but if you're queer, if you're black, if you're female, if you're trans, if you're disabled, if you're neurodivergent, or if you're a mix of any of those things, it just becomes harder and harder. So, I was keen to see what we could do to remedy that.
There are pockets of really good work that go on across music—we're not the only people doing this—but I thought there was a need for a more holistic approach, to better understand what we can do to raise the bar and increase the opportunities for everyone.
How is that embedded across your company strategy and the work you do?
For many companies, EDI is a tick-box exercise—and that's not a criticism—but for us, it informs everything we do. All of the projects we manage, all of our recruitment; every decision we make is based on making sure we've got good representation and that we're creating opportunities for people who otherwise wouldn't have them.
What do you believe are the risks of not addressing EDI within the music industry?
The risk of not doing anything is that the status quo remains the same. There's some really good work happening, but there are large sections of the music industry where there are gatekeepers who look like me, i.e. who are old or middle-aged, white, cis-gendered men. It's just not representative of the world we live in and we're trying to make it more representative. People who look like me need to be more aware of their privilege.
What are Come Play With Me's main EDI goals? What are you trying to achieve?
I guess it comes back to the question, 'When do you know your work is done?'. For us, it will be when there are no barriers and there's equal opportunity for everybody. However, we all know that's probably not going to happen certainly in my lifetime. So, the short-term goal is to continue what we're doing now. We do a lot of positive discrimination work where we consciously ask people with lived experience or experience specific challenges how we can support them. We want to understand what the specific barriers are that they face and where the commonalities and differences are for those with different protected characteristics or across different intersectionalities.
The medium-longer-term goal comes back to our specialities, which tend to be for people who are marginalised for reasons of gender identity or sexuality. There's some good research around gender identity, but there's a real lack of research when it comes to LGBTQ+ identities within music. So, our medium-longer term strategy is around putting together some research on that. We're starting to have some really wonderful conversations with some higher education organisations and academics but obviously, it's a much longer-term thing. The other big aspiration is to change our funding model to reduce our dependence on grant funding, which, for very good reason, often comes with strings that can be limiting.
Can you tell us more about Come Platform Me and what the programme involves?
Initially, we were working with promoters—people who put on live music events—and all of our programmes were borne out of just one-to-one training and we used to do lots of mentoring. However, we then realised that 90% of the conversations were the same or similar and that there was a lot of benefit in working in group scenarios. So, we then moved into more of a workshop-style programme and we did a whole series of them. We got lots of amazing feedback and realised how much value we were adding.
Lily [Sturt-Bolshaw, Event Lead at CPWM], who was running the programme for us, came up with the idea of Come Platform Me after she had loads of people asking if we could do something for engineers. We realised nobody was doing anything like it for engineers. So, Lily designed the programme in partnership with Hyde Park Book Club and Eiger Music Studios, both in Leeds. They put together a series of six sessions where we get participants into a recording studio and go through all the basics. It's just all about giving people permission to come into studios where they didn't feel they could before for whatever reason.
What is the key problem Come Platform Me is trying to solve?
The big problem is with engineers and promoters - people who put on live music events. If you ask me to name promoters or engineers, they'll almost always be white, cis-gendered men - and that's across the country. There is more diversity in London because there's a much bigger industry there, but it is still a problem throughout the whole of the UK. When people don't see anybody who looks like them, I've heard things like, 'This isn't a place for me' and 'I don't belong in this role'. It's really demoralising.
How do you reach and engage the programme's target audience?
Come Play With Me is going to be 10 years old in April, so we've developed quite a big following and quite a big local awareness. We also work with lots of local venues, music stores, recording studios, colleges, and universities, so we're very well-known by now. It's just about working with our partners and understanding if we're not working with people from a particular community or they're not applying to our programmes, who is?
I'm also a big fan of networks, even though that can be a bit of a buzzword. We're plumbed into quite a lot of other networks, including West Yorkshire Music Network, which we're delivering alongside Leeds Conservatoire and Create Britain and we are founding members of the Northern Music Network. We're also working with PRS Foundation, as one of their Talent Development Network, and with Youth Music. We also work with trade bodies and share our opportunities there.
The musicians themselves also share what we do with their followers, which helps. We also try, wherever possible, to get those people who've come through our programmes already to come back and act as either mentors or judges or in some other way inspire the next generation.
We're fortunate to have all of that. However, I'm always conscious that there's still a lot of people we're not reaching, especially those from lower socio-economic backgrounds - there's work to be done there. We want to make sure we're also reaching the people that don't see the opportunities, that aren't already aware of us or that aren't already our partners.
How do you know this activity works for improving diversity and inclusion?
Well, we know it's successful because we're getting wonderful feedback from all the people who go through it. We're ridiculously oversubscribed, which is both a positive and a negative. It always saddens me to know that there are people we're not supporting. We're always thinking about what we can be doing for those we can't offer the one-to-one support for, whether it's a bigger workshop or other ways to share information.
So, at the moment, we know it's working because of the anecdotal feedback we're getting. We also track where people go on and make sure we can signpost them or that they can find other ways to go on for themselves. For example, there's a young promoter who did one of our training programmes with Leeds 2023 and she's gone on to work for Howard Assembly Room. One of the other participants has gone on to be a promoter at Serious in London. We're big fans of listening to this feedback because we're really proud of all the things that go well, but there are always things we could have done differently.
Have you experienced any limitations, challenges or barriers in trying to deliver this work?
A minor thing early on, which we shot down straight away was whenever you do anything that's positive discrimination, you get pushed back. You get people saying, 'What about me?' You're not caring about my community’, especially when we did the early gender-based stuff. We'd often get men coming forward saying, 'I think you're being sexist in only inviting women or non-binary people to play'. However, that doesn't tend to happen so much now.
The biggest challenges now, I guess, are around resources. There are a ridiculous amount of demands and we're not able to satisfy all of it. We know we could do more with more money and I'm really grateful for the funding but there are limitations that come with it.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar initiatives?
Talk to the people you're trying to work with, don't just deliver a top-down approach you think might works. Speak to people and really try to understand what they're looking for. Speak to other organisations, like us, who are doing it because people will generally be very honest about what's gone well and what could have been done better. Build it together and genuinely make sure you're building what people want.
Talk to the employers as well and make sure you're creating something that actually makes sense - that industry wants/needs too. I think, in the past, we might have been guilty of creating opportunities, but not thinking about what comes next. Also, don't just assume people think like you. For example, if you're working with younger people, don't just give them the tools and assume they'll think entrepreneurially and then go out and apply those. Be aware that different people communicate in different ways.
Learn more about the Come Platform Me programme and how Come Play With Me is breaking down barriers in the live music sector by visiting www.cpwm.co.
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