This Friday, Liverpool’s Sound City+ conference will bring together a wide range of the music industry’s brightest executive talent.
Sophie Jones (Chief Strategy Officer, BPI), Isabel Garvey (Chief Operating Officer, Warner Music UK), Vanessa Bosåen (President, Virgin Music UK), Stephanie Haughton-Campbell (Chief Operating Officer, UK Music), Gee Davy (Chief Executive, AIM), Karen Emmanuel (Chief Executive, Key Production) and many more senior executives, leaders and expert practitioners from some of the UK’s most exciting music companies - right here in Liverpool.
Throughout a fast-paced day jam-packed with panels, discussions, workshops and roundtables we will be talking artist development, marketing, investment, superfans and streaming across three conference stages.
These are not talking heads flying in for a keynote; they are the people who sign deals, green-light campaigns and shape policy. Exactly the conversations our city needs in the room.
This year, for the first time, we’ve shaped the programme in partnership with record industry trade body BPI, industry analysts CMU and a range of other key sector partners, including AIM, Keychange, Musicians’ Union, PPL, PRS for Music, SAE, TuneCore and UK Music.
Why Liverpool? Because this city turns side-hustles into successful music businesses that compete on the global stage.
Sentric Music grew from a LIPA student project into one of the world’s leading music publishing administrators. In 2023 Paris-listed Believe acquired the company in a deal worth tens of millions of pounds - yet its core team still works out of the Baltic Triangle.
Ditto Music distributes releases to 160 platforms from a Liverpool head office, and numerous overseas branches.
These companies are living proof that you can run a worldwide music technology company from Lime Street, not Silicon Valley.
Modern Sky UK and 3 Beat Records turn local signings like Crawlers and Jamie Webster into top-ten artists, while retaining the labels, studios and staff in the city.
These companies exist because Liverpool is wired for music entrepreneurship. The city won UNESCO City of Music status in 2015 - formal recognition that the Beatles heritage isn’t museum culture but a still-working and thriving hotbed of performers, technicians, promoters and music entrepreneurs.
In November, the Liverpool City Region was named the UK’s new MusicFutures Creative Cluster: a £6.75 million, five‑year R&D partnership led by the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University and funded by UKRI’s Arts & Humanities Research Council.
MusicFutures will empower more than 1400 local music businesses and creators to flourish and create, connecting them with research on AI, VR, live‑event sustainability and intellectual‑property support, backed by over 20 industry partners from the M&S Bank Arena and Adlib to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.
The goal is simple: future‑proof Liverpool’s status as a global music city while creating high‑value jobs and a more inclusive talent pipeline
The North West benefits from Liverpool’s gravitational pull. New venues and studio facilities are popping up across the region, yet too many skilled professionals still migrate south for music industry careers. By hosting BPI’s In Tune With Tomorrow summit outside the capital for the first time, we put A&R, policy and music-tech decision makers directly in front of northern creators, instead of making them travel.
That matters for levelling‑up: In 2023, an economic analysis carried out by the Greater London Authority said that London’s music industry accounted for 63% of the UK’s musical output - and that the GVA per person working in the music industry in London was 92% higher than the UK as a whole. That’s an overwhelming concentration in one city.
Bringing the music industry’s decision-makers to Liverpool can help drive change to rebalance the map.
Sound City’s conference sits inside a living lab for music and creativity. Step outside our conference hub at Fact on Wood Street in the city’s thriving Ropewalks district, and within minutes you’re at Ditto’s HQ, Sentric’s buzzing dockside offices, two university music faculties and half a dozen independent studios - not to mention the dozens of music venues that will play host to Sound City’s weekend new music festival.
When our speakers and conference delegates step outside, they will be stepping into the very heart of the ecosystem they’ve been discussing, and the new heart of the music business.
We hope that many of them will return - and we know that everyone who comes to this year’s conference will go home with the knowledge that Liverpool’s music industry has its eyes fixed firmly on the future.
For artists, proximity matters even more, and Liverpool’s creatives will be able to sit in on conversations with Punch Records’ Ammo Talwar - fresh from his genre-breaking Grime x Classical crossover event at London’s Southbank Centre; Marathon Music’s Cherish Mengel and Ministry Of Sound’s A&R boss Anton Powers talking modern A&R; and AIM Chair and Beggars exec Ruth Barlow looking at how record labels really work - alongside a day-long programme of workshops and discussions.
At Sound City+ the gap between hearing advice and applying it in practice shrinks to hours, not months.
I’m often asked what success looks like for Sound City+. It’s not about climbing the conference league table; it’s about seeing more northern names in the BPI’s next market-share report, and more Liverpool companies on a fast track to growth. One thing I can guarantee is that the next success stories of the music business are bubbling up in Liverpool right now, and as those companies grow, thrive, expand and stand in their own right, that is when I can look back and say the conference has done its job.
Liverpool gave the world the Beatles. In 2025 it’s where the next generation of music leaders are being made. That’s why Sound City+ matters - and why the UK’s music industry is boarding trains for Lime Street this week.