The impact of the MITO SettembreMusica Festival in Milan

Customer: MITO SettembreMusica
Research team: Severino Salvemini (Scientific supervisor), Ilaria Morganti, Massimiliano Nuccio

Since the first edition of Festival MITO, it was considered important to integrate the design of musical events with ad hoc researches aimed to investigate different aspects of the event. In particular the first year it has been observed the behaviour of the public attending the events through an analysis investigating the interests, the artistic tastes, the motivation to participate, the accrued expectations, the perception, the willingness to pay and many other aspectslinked to the vital records (age, gender, provenance, occupation, education title, etc.) and to the ways to participate in events (how to select shows, autonomous participation or in groups, with friends or relatives, choice of schedules, etc.).
During the second edition the monitoring work of the Festival was focused on completely different issues.In the light of a thorough knowledge of the musical context in Milan, the characteristics that distinguish it, the resources that characterize it and the limitations that reduce the chances of success in an international context, it was assessed how MITO could fit into that scenario and become aninterlocutor for the valorization of the system and its assertion.In particular, emphasis was placed on the theme of musical education that is one of the most pronounced criticality: the perception, very often real, of a non-proper musical training inhibits the participation of people to a certain type of event, judged astoo high in cultural level, segmenting the audience in a defined way.
Even at the third edition it was chosen to reflect on the possibility of launching a new study program, this time to assess the economic impact of the festival, that is the fallout of a given event on the economy of the territory it occupies.The concept of economic impact represents one of the components that are generally considered to assess the significance of an event along with other factors such as the cultural, environmental and social impact.The assessment of the economic impacts represents one of the themes around which the academic debate is more heated.On the one hand it recognizes the urgent need to demonstrate whether cultural investments represent an opportunity for the area in economic terms; on the other hand, however, it is possible to sense the marginality of the economic factor as a parameter for assessment of an artistic project whose consequences affect in a moresignificant and extended way the cultural, social and political dimension of a community and a place.