Marketing a Small North Atlantic Society

Musical Marketing of a Small North Atlantic Society
A New Alliance between Business and Politics in the Faroe Islands

The chapter that I am preparing for the volume Popular Music in the Nordic Countries focuses on the Faroe Islands. It has been fascinating doing field research in a small society that receives little attention in mainstream international media but has a rich cultural life that puts many of the issues that occupy the modern world into perspective. The Faroe Islands are in a remarkable process of creating rethinking its place in the global village.

In a 2008 Faroe Business Report article on “nation branding” in the Faroe Islands, author, entrepreneur, and musician Elin Brimheim Heinesen commented on the marketing of the islands:

Our traditions in arts and crafts are held in high esteem and I believe their continuance is extremely important...There are strong currents driving opportunities in our direction: foreigners see something new, different and unspoiled in our culture. At the same time, we have up and coming Faroese music artists gaining audiences around the world.

The following year, the Faroese Minister of Trade and Industry spoke to the crowd at an event intended to foster and promote the burgeoning music industry in the islands about the importance of “personal branding” for aspiring professional musicians, adding that

One can say of the Faroe Islanders that we are very supportive of the creative and performing arts. Indeed we are very proud of our music which is an expression of who we are and what it means to be Faroese.

In Faroese business and politics, music is valued as a marketable resource and an essential element of national identity. At the time, musicians are making efforts to promote their music for broader international audiences. These developments play into a larger evolution in global cultural tourism over the past several decades. In the original 1976 edition of The Tourist, for instance, Dean MacCannell keenly observed that tourists had already begun pushing their way to the world's more remote locales in anticipation of the forms of authentic difference that they might find there (1976:186). The quest for those experiences and places imagined to be "authentic," or at least sufficiently "other," remains a motivation for many travelers. Jón Tyril, the organizer of the Faroes’ first major music festival called the G! Festival says the Faroese language often acts as one such important marker of authenticity for foreigners. Tyril explained to me in 2011 that “people are very occupied by authenticity and roots and all that, so it works perfectly to sing Faroese songs.”

Music and musicians have indeed begun to play an increasingly important role in the branding of the Faroes as they are repeatedly invoked as signifiers of authentic national distinctiveness. One might argue cynically that music may be made more innocuous and ultimately losing its unique capacity to sustain strong local communities as it becomes mediated as a global commodity, but another view is that those living in distant corners of Europe are motivated to make use of the resources at hand to differentiate themselves in the global market.

Faroese traditional and popular music now make up one of the most well-publicized aspects of the islands’ culture that is currently marketed to tourists. In sharp contrast to earlier touristic material, such as The Faroe Islands: Yours to Discover (Sansir 2010) which barely mentions music, recent brochures are replete with depictions of the islands’ music and musicians. In some cases, pamphlets are even dominated by music advertisement: the 2011 booklet The Faroe Islands: Take a Deep Breath (Sansir 2011a) features pictures and descriptions of the islands musicians on six of its sixteen pages, including the photo of singer Eivør Pálsdóttir on the cover. In other words, nearly 40% of that particular brochure is comprised of exclusively music-related material. Notably, this brochure figures very prominently on the Faroe tourism website (visitfaroeislands.com 2013).

Even in less music-dominated brochures, however, a prevailing concern with the amount of space devoted to Faroese music is clearly evident. For example, in the 2013 booklet, there are four full pages devoted to solely pictures and images of Faroese music, and lesser textual or pictorial references to the islands’ music and musicians appear in some form on at least five additional pages, for instance, in advertising local music festivals (see Sansir 2013). One can find a similarly healthy representation of Faroese music in the touristic promotional films commissioned by the Faroese tourist industry, several of which discuss music exclusively (see Kovboy Films 2009). The tourism website also features music as one of its four main headers on its introductory page: under the banner “Live Music Every Day,” a brief description informs potential tourists that “Music plays a major role in Faroese culture. During the summer you are spoilt for choice as there are live conserts [sic] every day all over the islands” (visitfaroeislands.com 2013).

As hopefully even this brief overview has suggested, entire nations, via their tourism industries, are often engaged in large-scale processes of “impression management” of a sort that are analogous to Erving Goffman’s (1959) discussion of the performance of self. Music and musicians appear to be playing an increasingly important role in this somewhat high-stakes field nation branding and marketing. Music has entered the global marketing of the Faroe Islands, and this is both more powerful and more complicated than many have imagined. The cultural sphere is not just a sensitive sphere; it is also a human resource before it can be an economic one, and the recent evolutions illustrate some of the complexities facing North Atlantic societies today.

References

Dahl, Johan. 2009; “Music Industry Event” (introductory speech). http://www.vmr.fo/Files/Billeder/vinnumalaradid/Music_Industry_Event.pdf

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York:DoubleDay.

Heinesen, Elin Brimheim. 2008. Interview with Búi Tyril. Faroe Business Report.   http://elinbrimheimheinesen.blogspot.ca/2008/11/its-all-in-mix.html

Kovboy Films. 2009. Faroe Islands tourism videos. Accessed 8 April 2013, available at

http://www.youtube.com/kovboyfilm

MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley:University      

of California Press.

Ritzer, G. and Liska, A. 2003. “McDisenyization and Post-Tourism: Complimentary

Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism”. In C. Rojek and J. Urry (Eds.) Touring Cultures:Transformations of Travel and Theory. London:Routledge.