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Business News Education & Events The Great Escape 2011
TGE: Chat with Music From Ireland’s Angela Dorgan
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 4 May 2011
We’ve been talking to some of the people involved in this year’s Great Escape convention. Today we are focusing on our featured country this year – Ireland – and have fired some questions off to Angela Dorgan from Music From Ireland.
Q: What is Music From Ireland?
A: Music From Ireland is a cross arts and music industry collective in Ireland set up to create an identity around Irish acts showcasing at seven international music events. Artists receive financial support, we create a sampler CD, a website for each event, produce showcases and generally fly the flag for Irish music. MFI is run by First Music Contact in partnership with Culture Ireland and IMRO.
Q: How do you select what bands you support at the showcase festivals you visit?
A: We don’t. We prefer the festivals in question to select the showcasing acts. After all they know their territories and audiences far better than we do.
Q: What Irish bands are you profiling at The Great Escape this year?
A: Villagers, James Vincent McMorrow, And So I Watch You From Afar, Fight Like Apes, Fionn Regan, Funeral Suits, Sacred Animals, Halves, Cap Pas Cap and Rhob Cunningham.
Q: Tell us a bit more about First Music Contact
A: FMC is a free information and advice resource for bands, musicians and the independent music sector in Ireland. We have over thirty factsheets on the industry on our website, we run clinics on the music business and provide one-to-one free consultancies with artists at all stages of their development. FMC is funded by the Arts Council and delivers a number of key projects to showcase and develop Irish music at different levels: Breakingtunes, Hard Working Class Heroes, Music From Ireland and The FMC Tour.
Q: Where does Hard Working Class Heroes fit in?
A: Hard Working Class Heroes is an annual showcase event we hold in Dublin. From about 700 applications each year we have a panel of over 30 international and local music judges select 100 acts to play at six venues over three days in Dublin’s City Centre. We keep the weekend ticket price reasonable to encourage audiences to support new music and also work in partnership with Culture Ireland to bring in key music industry figures and buyers from around the world. We have a music industry conference that we film and make available for free download after the event and we have loads of fun asides. The main aim is to give the music industry in Ireland an annual focus and showcase event.
Q: What is Breaking Tunes?
A: Breakingtunes is an online music portal we created to have one central website where you could come and discover music in Ireland. Industry use it to follow and develop links with acts, audiences use it to update themselves and bands use it to network with each other. The listings section also has a special widget so that when bands update their listings on Breakingtunes, it updates them on all their other social networks too. We have also developed an iPhone app which is free from the Apple Store where you can search and discover new Irish Music.
Q: The music industry around the world is coming to terms with a lot of changes, how is the Irish music community shaping up?
A: Ireland’s live scene is really healthy at the moment, there are some really creative labels like Richter Collective (ASIWYFA), Delphi (Sacred Animals, Deaf Joe) Popical Island and Faction (James V McMorrow). There are some great boutique festivals, Castlepalooza, Body & Soul and Indiependence, as well as the bigger ones, Oxegen and Electric Picnic. Venues here are also for the most part, really easy to approach and book. I think what we do here best is produce really good music and this year has been quite an exceptional one so far for Irish successes.
