Sound City turns nineteen this year. In a landscape where independent music events get acquired, rebranded or quietly wound down, that’s more of an achievement than it sounds, and one that I’m hugely proud of.
The festival and conference circuit looks quite different from when we started out. Well-funded newcomers arrive with political backing and marketing budgets that most independent events could only dream of. Long-standing events get acquired and sucked in by major corporate players.
And across the North West, there’s no shortage of interest - some of it very well resourced - in claiming the mantle of the region’s music industry.
Sound City’s claim isn’t staked on marketing or political backing. It’s built on nineteen years of industry relationships, nineteen years of artists and companies that came through this event and built something real, and nineteen years of support from the organisations that actually run the UK music business.
That includes the BPI, PRS for Music, PPL, PRS Foundation, AIM, Keychange, the Musicians’ Union, SAE, TuneCore and UK Music.
Those organisations come back every year because the event delivers for them and for their members. When the BPI brings its acclaimed In Tune With Tomorrow conference to Liverpool - outside London for the first time - that’s a reflection of a relationship built over a long time, not a one-off.
We’re not the only ones doing this. Wide Days in Edinburgh, Focus Wales in Wrexham, the Leicester Music Conference, Un-Convention in Manchester, the Parallel Music Conference in Southampton - these are serious, independent, industry-facing events run by people who care deeply about their cities and their scenes, without the safety net of major institutional backing.
Together they make up a circuit that is doing more for regional music industry development than the group of events backed by big money or political interests. Sound City is proud to be part of that movement.
That independence matters in Liverpool too - perhaps especially here. Ask most people outside the industry what Liverpool means to music and they’ll tell you about the Beatles. That’s fine - the heritage is real and it matters. But it has also tended to obscure what this city actually is now: a place with a functioning, globally competitive music industry that has been quietly building for years.
As Vice Chair of the Liverpool Music Board, I’ve had a front row seat. Liverpool's music infrastructure runs deeper than most people realise - and further back.
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society is the oldest continuing concert-giving organisation in the UK, founded in 1840.
Sentric Music, at the other end of the timeline, started as a LIPA student project and was acquired by Paris-listed Believe in 2023 for tens of millions of pounds - and its core team still works from Liverpool’s historic Exchange Flags building. Ditto Music distributes to 160 platforms worldwide from a Liverpool head office. Adlib is one of the largest audio production companies in Europe.
That range - from a 185-year-old cultural institution to globally competitive music tech companies - is what a real music city looks like. The Music Board exists to support and grow all of it.
In 2023, an economic analysis by the Greater London Authority found that London accounts for 63% of the UK's musical output, and that GVA per person working in music in London is 92% higher than the UK average. That concentration has consequences - for talent, for investment, for where careers get built. Liverpool Music Month, launching this year, is a direct response to that.
New York has run its own music month since 2017 - built not as a tourism exercise but as a sustained assertion of the city’s industry credentials, backed by concrete infrastructure: a public Music Industry BA, a dedicated Office Of Nightlife, a Mayor’s office that treats music as an economic sector rather than a cultural amenity.
Shira Gans, who leads those initiatives from the NYC Mayor’s Office Of Media And Entertainment, is at Sound City+ this Friday to talk through what other cities can learn from New York’s approach.
Liverpool’s music month arrives at a moment when this city has the infrastructure, the companies and the ambition to make the same kind of case.
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, funded by UKRI’s Arts And Humanities Research Council, with more than 20 industry partners from the M&S Bank Arena to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.
The programme this Friday is built around the questions that actually keep people in this industry up at night.
What does artist development look like beyond the mythology of getting signed - and what should artists expect from the people who work alongside them? How do you build a genuine audience around an artist while running a campaign that pays its way?
What does sync licensing look like from both sides of the pitch, and how do artists make their catalogues more visible to the supervisors placing music in film, TV and games? What does a modern superfan strategy actually look like when you move from theory to a specific campaign for a specific artist?
Kal Lavelle, whose co-write on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shivers’ earned her a BMI Award and an Ivor Novello nomination, talks about the craft and working reality of professional songwriting.
Rupinder Virdee and Bina ‘Bob’ Mistry introduce the new South Asian Women In Music network - because 25 years ago the number of visible South Asian women working in the UK music industry could be counted on one hand, and that figure has barely shifted.
And Michelle Connery from QMusic in Queensland and Matias Mancisidor from VAM in Valparaiso join me on stage to compare notes on what it takes for cities outside their national capitals to build a globally recognised music identity.
Sound City exists to grow the music industry in Liverpool and to connect it with the world. Nineteen years of that work is visible in the companies based here, the careers built here, and the industry partners who keep coming back.
The next success stories of the music business are taking shape in this city right now - and Sound City’s job, as it has always been, is to make sure the rest of the industry is in the room when it happens.