What Brexit Means for Touring – Jolene Zhu Zhou

With the UK now outside of the EU, and the ramifications of that decision making themselves felt, live music practitioners and their representative bodies are impressing upon the government the need for action to alleviate the situation amidst grave concern over the scale of the difficulties faced by artists and touring personnel. In this blog post, LMX student intern Jolene Zhu Zhou discusses the damage that Brexit could do to UK artists’ touring prospects, and responses from industry and parliamentary figures.  

Valuing live music: UK Live Music Census report 2017 – Emma Webster, Matt Brennan, Adam Behr and Martin Cloonan with Jake Ansell (2018)

Author(s): Emma Webster, Matt Brennan, Adam Behr and Martin Cloonan with Jake Ansell Organisation: University of Edinburgh / Live Music Exchange Date: 2018 The UK’s first ever national live music census took place in 2017. For 24 hours from noon on Thursday 9th March, volunteers in cities across the country went out and about to live music events, from pub …  

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 …  

The Musicians’ Union Fair Play Venues Scheme – Sheena Macdonald

This week’s blog post explains the rationale behind the Musicians’ Union Fair Play Venues scheme. Sheena Macdonald – Musicians’ Union Regional Organiser for Scotland and Northern Ireland – discusses the background to the scheme and opportunities for musicians to participate. I came to my job at the Musicians’ Union (MU) as a fan, a fan of live music. And like …