Sound City is the UK champion for new music: a globally recognised music festival and talent development agency and an international ambassador for Liverpool culture - proudly based in the North of England.
They’ve been designing and delivering events since 2007, across the UK, Europe, America and Asia where they create cultural experiences for diverse audiences and life-changing music-making and support programmes with marginalised and underrepresented young people.
We spoke to managing director Becky Ayres to learn more about Sound City.
Tell us how and where Sound City first started
We run a flagship festival called Sound City that takes place in Liverpool every May. It's a multi-venue event and we have over 300 artists that come and play. People like Ed Sheeran, Stormzy and Young Fathers played when they were first starting out. We also do a music business conference and we run training and artist development programmes for young people who want to get into music. Our mission is to help to dismantle the barriers that young people face to creating music or working in the industry. We work with people from all backgrounds and we do workshops, training, mentoring and offer bursaries to young people to help them develop their careers.
How has the festival grown since then?
We started in 2008 when Liverpool was the City of Culture. Everyone at the time felt they had to go to London to have a career and we wanted people to feel like they could stay in the north west and have a career here. Sound city was always about creating that gravity to build an industry in the north.We saw that there were a lot of great university courses out there but a lot of people couldn’t afford them, so we created our own training programmes for anyone who had a burning desire to get into music. All of our training programmes are free and we try to attract people that can’t afford to go into further education to give them an opportunity to build a career. We do that with artists as well.
Who are some of the artists that have benefited from Sound City programmes so far?
There’s a band from the North West called The Mysterines who did our artist development programme and they went on to get BBC support and do headline tours off the back of it. A singer songwriter called Fiona Lennon came to us when she was doing open nights and now she’s just supported Paul Heaton on tour and is doing really well. We also had a band called SPINN who we worked with and took over to South Korea as they’re massively receptive to British artists and they did really well from that.How have you seen music infrastructure develop in Liverpool over the years?
It’s been amazing. Liverpool is a really creative city and there’s always been a strong creative industry here. There’s lots of artists and a really supportive community. Sound city will be 18 next year so it’s been going for a long time, and since we started it we've seen a lot of things develop. Sentric Music, which is a global publisher, is based here. Ditto Music is also based here. There’s really great independent venues like the Kazimier Garden, The Zanzibar, and the Arts Club. There’s also the first carbon neutral venue in Birkenhead called Future Yard. Liverpool is still quite affordable to live in and so people can base themselves here and still be able to do something they love. It's a very welcoming city.How are these programmes funded, who are your main supporters and how does the relationship work beyond providing finances?
Arts Council England are our core funder, so they fund us as one of their national portfolio organisations. We also have support from PRS Foundation as one of their talent development partners. We’re really passionate about making sure people from any protected characteristic get opportunities and they’re really enthusiastic about supporting that work.We have some philanthropic partners including one called Capll. They support all the programmes that we run for young people and pay for the bursaries. Every year we give out bursaries of £400 to support young people in buying equipment or doing paid work experience so we’re really grateful for that support.
What is Sound City’s involvement with Keychange?
Keychange is the global movement for gender equality in music. It was started by PRS Foundation with a number of European partners by looking at festival line-ups and saying that there needed to be more gender equality there, because you can’t see what you can’t be. Since then it’s developed to be much more about intersectional characteristics as well. Gender equality is really important but so is class, race, disability, and every characteristic where people face challenges. It’s a really important movement and Sound City are the UK lead festival partner which means we promote gender equality, not just across what you see on stage but also within our team behind the stage. We’re trying to show what should be best practices across the programmes that we run.How do you connect and reach the young people who need your help the most?
We work with all the music education hubs in the Liverpool City region. We do music education days where young people can come along and find out about all the different jobs in the music industry. We’ll do things like case studies with artists. We recently had Amy from the band Crawlers speak about what she did after college and her radio plugger and PR person all spoke about a day-in-the-life of what they do. We host workshops where you can learn about things like DJing, or how to market your music with no budget.We also work with local councils, particularly in the more deprived areas, where we offer training for people who are in care or in very challenging circumstances. We do a lot of work around confidence building. One of the young people we worked with managed to develop their own marketing strategies for their music and made some money from it, and they then went on to teach the other young people on the course about it. We give them some mentoring and a bursary and it’s amazing to see how they run with it.
How can the wider music industry make young people more aware of the career opportunities outside of the traditional performer roles?
I think there’s more that needs to be done in schools. Music is such a great thing to get young people interested in and there’s a lot of young people that don’t like education but they like music. There needs to be some teaching before GCSE level to help them understand all the different jobs that exist in music and to help parents understand that music can be a really viable career. Ticketing, for example, is a massive area that employs lots of people. Music needs to become something that people feel they can choose as a career option because it is a multi billion pound industry.Finally, tell us what you’re excited about for the next Sound City.
I’m excited that we’re in our 18th edition. It’s amazing to get to that age as a festival and for people to still love it and want to come as much as they do. Our application to play is now open until the 25th January, so if you go to our website you can apply to play. Anyone that’s doing their own music should definitely apply.I’m always excited about the conference that we run. Loads of young people that want to get into music attend and get to meet music industry professionals and it’s all about everyone getting together and chatting. People always seem to make long lasting connections there.
To find out more about Sound City or apply to play head to the links below.
https://www.soundcity.uk.com/
@/LIVERPOOLSOUNDCITY