Image courtesy of Scott Cross
I spent a great day at a music industry event in Preston last Thursday, nicely named ‘SoundBytes’. Put together by the nice people at Lancashire County Council’s Creative Lancashire team, with support from the the Arts Council, Business Link NW, and of course our good selves at Vision+Media. Well done in particular to Ed at Lancs County Council for pulling the whole thing together.It was a really useful and hugely enjoyable day, which took place in the lovely surroundings of the Pavilion in the beautiful Avenham Park (a great place to spend a glorious summer day).
I kicked off the day at a very un-rock n roll time of 10am, for a handful of one-to-one surgery sessions. Myself and Pete Jenkinson (Music Is Ours) and Mike Wilson (Business Link NW) were kept really busy with a variety of businesses. I have to say its one of the parts of my job that I like best - meeting businesses, finding out about their problems and successes, and seeing what useful advice/information or help we can offer.
The first session after lunch was on the topic of Music Synchronisation, Composition, Licensing and publishing. Everyone seems to be interested in sync deals and I think too many people think it's an easy way to make money in the new music industry. A brilliant panel provided loads of useful and interesting info and proved that it isn’t really that easy to get money from TV/film/games companies in reality.
The wonderful Rachel Wood of Woodwork Music gave a clear insight into how she has become a successful agent for a range of independently owned music for use in TV advertising, computer games and other visual media. It sounds glamorous, but from Rachel’s description it involved lots of hard work developing and maintaining relationships, knowing her catalogue inside out and being reliable. She disclosed that the two other people at Woodwork were spending their day watching (and listening) to one of the CSI strands to see what types of types of music they used at different times. (Later on I read Rachel’s biog and found out that she had danced on stage with Prince, which I'll have to ask her next time!)
Local lads Jode and David from Verbal Vigilante Music described how in the few years since they left college, they’d gone from providing music for a former tutor, doing similar work for friends who were doing animated films and realising that they liked doing ‘applied music’. They are now an award-winning music production company writing and producing original music for film, tv and games, specialising in music for film trailers. They admitted it took them a while to understand music libraries and how they work, but once they’d got to grips with that they started to move up the industry ladder. They stressed the importance of getting out and meeting people, as well as using social media. One key thing that both they and Rachel agreed on was that you should always get paid - receiving payment is a matter of professionalism, even if a budget is tiny.
There was another session on using social media in the music industry, but I was involved in delivering more one-to-one advice sessions in tandem with the brilliant Liam Walsh, head honcho of Manchester’s Ask Me PR. Everyone seemed to welcome our input so I think we worked well together! Scattered around the room doing similar things were the hard worked Pete Jenkinson, Karen from UKTI, Mike (Business Link), Chris (Arts Council), and Karen (Crisis Management).
The evening began with a panel made up of some great names and all credit to Ed and to Pete for getting them all there. Chaired by Dave Haslam, the panel contained the renowned Mr Scruff, manager Karen Boardman (who definitely tells it like it is), Dave Pichilingi (now hugely successful director of Sound City), Liam Walsh, Jayne Compton (Switchflicker) and Andy Votel (Twisted Nerve). Dave Haslam managed to keep in order what could have been an unruly panel and got lots of fascinating facts from the illustrious group.
Tthe day finished with a great gig featuring Misty’s Big Adventure and Johnny 5th Wheel and Dj sets from Preston is My Paris and Robbie Judkins. All in all a great day attended by over 80 delegates. And I have to be honest, I didn’t know you could have that much fun in Preston.
