Dunc from The Autumn Store (and various indiepop bands, I’ve slightly lost track tbh) has followed this with “Why Don’t People Come To My Gigs”: Some thoughts on audience categorisation. Which is very good and kinda in the vein of the guides to promoting gigs he wrote a while back (have a root through his site).

Following a couple of links, I stumbled across Scene Not Heard which seems to have started at the beginning of this year:

Scene Not Heard aims to be a portal for artists and fans alike to the massive great plethora of musical happenings going on in Birmingham

There’s also a discussion thread about Birmingham’s music scene on Drowned in Sound, but I think they tend to come round fairly frequently.

Which all adds up to a community of music people in Birmingham all wanting to make stuff happen (standard caveats about ‘music’ tending to refer to indie/rock only in these kinds of discussions).

One more thing to highlight in all of this is a line from Dunc’s post in which he refers to the original discussion on Capsule’s blog, the significance of which I leave to you to discern:

it’s off the back of an event discussing the ‘music industry’ which always makes me feel like I shouldn’t be part of the conversation

There were two criteria to this, firstly, they must have a myspace page and secondly, they must have spent most of their musical lives inside the West Midlands Bus Network

The result is slightly reminiscent of the Myspace Marathons BiNS’ did for Gigbeth and Dunc’s patience in pulling together that many links to MySpace pages has to be applauded.

Click here to see the list.

(There are a couple of voting days left so please vote CiB – http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-uk-blog/)