Episode 9: How do you build a successful live brand?

As part of our first ever Skiddle Summit earlier this year, Angie chats to Eoin Bloor, founder and director of LDN DV8 Bass Face, a DNB & Bassline events company that has grown from strength to strength. They're also joined by Lisa Connelly, founder of The Bechdel Sound Test, a festival dedicated to celebrating women and gender minority talent in music & wider culture,  Harriet JW, founder of Secret Sessions, and Cassie Fox, founder of the LOUD WOMEN organisation. 

This month Angie chats to some key figures involved in Record Store Day this year, including Megan Page, Marketing Manager at Record Store Day UK, Emily Waller who is the Marketing Manager at Rough Trade stores in the UK and Jeremy Pritchard, bassist of the hit indie rock band, Everything Everything.

This month Angie is joined by Helen Sartory of The Rattle, Dr. Jonathan Lindley of Sunbird Records in Lancashire and Halina Rice, an independent electronic artist paving the way for augmented reality livestreams. The team chat about livestreams, music and gaming and the future for music tech. 

Episode 6 sees the Guest List with an all new host, Skiddle's Angie Bhandal, talking to Vick Bain, the creator of the F-List - a directory of female musicians as a resource for the music industry to encourage diversity. They're also joined by Alexandra Ampofo who sits on the board at the F-list and is a promoter at Metropolis Music. We chat about why diversity is important and how you can champion change for the better using resources like the F-List. If you like this podcast please give us a follow and share to spread the good word! 

Episode 5 brings together Niks Delanancy (Black Bandcamp), artist manger Charlotte Caleb (Kobalt), and Sacha Wall (Data Transmission) to discuss raving, race and responsibility at this year's Brighton Music Conference, in collaboration with shesaid.so Brighton.

This episode was recorded live during a Skiddle webinar on 23rd July 2020.

The live sector has, like almost everything else, been left devastated by the ongoing Coronavirus crisis; venues are closing, people are out of work, businesses are going under.

According to one estimate, 80% of UK music venues are under serious risk of permanent closure and £900m has been wiped from the £1.1bn live sector this year, while the Association of Independent Festivals says that 92% of its members face permanent collapse.

But we are now beginning to emerge from the other side.

The Government has announced the return of indoor and outdoor live events, along with a £1.57 billion rescue package for the nation’s stricken music, arts and culture venues.

But is it enough? Does the government's roadmap to recovery make sense? Are the newly published guidelines realistic?

To help us take stock and answer some of these questions (and plenty more) Skiddle's David Blake is joined by: Michael Kill, CEO of the Night Time Industries Association; John Rostron, the Executive Chair of the Association of Independent Promoters; Alice Woods, DJ, promoter and co founder of Meat Free, Under One Roof and Shake Your Soul, and Tumi Williams, a member of the Cardiff Music Board and a Senior Booking Agent at Bombarda Agency.

As the music industry pledges to tackle institutional racism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests which have erupted across the world, Skiddle’s David Blake is joined by three guests - Amanda Maxwell (Shesaid.so/Freelance Queens), Kwame Kwaten (Ferocious Talent/consultant/producer) and Kitty Amor (DJ/Motherland) - to discuss what is being done and what more we can do.

According to the Music Venue Trust, over 550 grassroots venues in the UK face the very
real threat of permanent closure in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. The knock on
effects, culturally, are hard to imagine.

So how are venues up and down the country coping and responding to the situation. How
bad is it? What can we do? And how might the loss of grassroots music venues affect the
wider industry and the very fabric of our culture?

Skiddle’s head of content David Blake is joined by the Music Venue Trust CEO, Mark
Davyd; the owner of the famous Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, Nathan Clark, and Toni
Coe-Brooker, production and programming manager at the Green Door Store in Brighton.

With the industry in turmoil following the outbreak of COVID-19 and countless postponements and cancellations, we want to see how festival organisers are coping and responding to the situation.

Is it reasonable to expect any festivals to go ahead this year? How different might the festival experience become in the wake of the outbreak? And how have artists and agents responded to the crisis?

We pose all of those questions and more to our guests: Jon Drape, director of Engine No. 4 (Bluedot, Parklife, Snowbombing, Kendal Calling); Jorge Meehan, co-founder of JBM Music (Acropolis, Southern Sunset Festival, Reggae Festivals); Georgie Thorogood, director of Dixie Fields Festival, and Richard Dyer, co-founder of Highest Point Festival and Skiddle.