June 2026 Letter: Statewide Tour Recap

MusicOregon Southern Oregon Listening Tour Stop: Jacksonville, OR, 5/20/26

Friends-

Oregon's a beautiful place with a vibrant music scene that's every bit a match to the stunning landscape. Last week, Music Advocacy Council Co-Chair Cheri Jamison, MusicOregon Board member Dick Huey, and I drove across Oregon listening. Seven sites, nearly 90 people, 1,250 miles, nearly twenty hours of conversation in the Gorge (Hood River), North Coast (Tillamook), Willamette Valley (Salem and Eugene), Southern Oregon (Jacksonville), Central Oregon (Bend), and Eastern Oregon (Pendleton). We learned a lot.

What we heard was consistent in ways we didn't entirely expect. Every community named the same core problems: getting people out to shows, getting paid a livable rate, and finding connection. Folks work in isolation, often largely invisible to the rest of Oregon's music world and to each other. We also heard about performance rights organizations that are aggressively enforcing licensing fees at rates that don't scale to venue size or revenue. Venues are shutting down live music rather than face the exposure.

But we also heard things that genuinely energized us. In Klamath Falls, Klamath Music is a small but effective nonprofit doing real work to support a rural music community with the backing of local business leaders and public officials. In Tillamook, an Echo Fund recipient now living on the North Coast told us directly what a difference the MusicOregon grant made to her career. Granges across the state are using local and regional music to reactivate their spaces and reenergize their role in the community. At our Southern Oregon stop, thirty-six people from Klamath Falls, Ashland, Medford, and Grants Pass showed up on a Wednesday evening because they had things to say and had been waiting for someone to ask.

We were excited by every conversation. While there is a lot of work to be done, the findings of the listening tour suggest the path forward for MusicOregon: supporting Oregon's distinct regional music scenes by extending resources, connections, career development, and advocacy across the state.

Later this summer, we'll be sharing our findings with listening tour participants, the music community, funders, and public officials. But the short version is this: there is an active music sector in every region of the state that is hungry, resourceful, and working largely on its own. Connecting these music communities is the work before us.

On behalf of MusicOregon and my fellow listeners, Dick Huey and Cheri Jamison, thank you to everyone who showed up and to the Oregon Community Foundation for their support. 

Tim Wilson

PS: We owe a debt of gratitude to our local partners and hosts: The Columbia Center for the Arts in Hood River, Eric Sappington with the Fairview Grange in Tillamook, our Salem partners Erik Andersson, the CEO of SEDCOR and Jason Wojciechowski of Object Permanence Pressing, Patrick Hosfield at WOW Hallin Eugene, Ashley Bradfield of Crash and C Mac Productions in Southern Oregon, NicK Depew at Klamath Music, Emmanual Ogala at Jos Play in Bend, and Roberta Lavadour at Pendleton Center for the Arts.

Song of the Month: Roll on Columbia by Woody Guthrie