The Creative Conteract

The rise of social media (e.g., YouTube) has made music videos a valuable tool for music promotion and audience engagement. While this has opened up opportunities for collaboration between musicians and visual artists, the demand for visual works continues to grow. For emerging artists with limited or zero budget, the most common way to meet industry standards is through exchanging creative capital (competencies + skills + time = creative output). Under this basis, creatives enter into a collaboration rooted in camaraderie. However, power dynamics, cultural differences and extractive practices often hinder such collaborations.
To address this, we propose a renewed Creative Contract—a convivial agreement rooted in mutual respect and reciprocity. We discuss the creative exchanges between early-career musicians and visual artists, the ethical concerns that arise during these (exchanges) and offer suggestions for establishing more harmonious and sustainable collaborative agreements.
Through a participatory design workshop, we invite participants to write their creative contracts while co-creating a speculative cover artwork. The process follows a series of prompts and uses tools specifically designed to support and guide participants as they make decisions together. The workshop guides participants through collaborative agreements and helps identify non-extractive collaborative practices. While participants are not required to have experience in audiovisual or multimedia practices, it is preferred that they have an interest in collaborative creative practices.