The UK Live Music Census – a Live Music Exchange project – began at noon yesterday, on Thursday 9th March. The first strand to the data collection exercise – snapshot censuses in Glasgow, Newcastle, Oxford, Leeds, Brighton and Southampton – finished today at 12 noon. Volunteers have been out and about trying to get to every live music event in …
Author Archives: Live Music Exchange
Are DJ fees killing dance music? – Gareth Whitehead
This week’s blog post is by guest contributor Gareth Whitehead, who manages Bullet Dodge Records, regularly promotes House and Techno events, and lectures in Music Business at New College Lanarkshire. In it, he highlights the issue of high DJ fees and the booking agents who ask for them, and questions whether there is now a need for collective action against …
Getting the Needle – Martin Cloonan
This week’s blog post is by Live Music Exchange’s own Martin Cloonan, who, with John Williamson, has just completed an important piece of work on the social history of the Musicians’ Union (for more on this, listen to Martin on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed). This piece is about how the policy of ‘needletime’, brought in to protect the musicians …
UK Live Music Census 2017 – update
As we announced back in November, the Live Music Exchange team are currently working on an exciting new project, the UK Live Music Census, the first exercise of its kind anywhere in the world to attempt to measure live music activity across an entire country. Yesterday the University of Edinburgh published a press release about the Census and it has …
Reflections on the Mercury Prize – Simon Frith
In this, the last blog post of 2016, Live Music Exchange’s own Simon Frith reflects on his 25-year tenure as the chair of the judges of the Mercury Prize to consider what has – and hasn’t – changed within the UK record industry over the last quarter of a century. On September 15, after Skepta was awarded the 2016 Mercury …