The Leisure, Sport and Culture Overview and Scrutiny Committee is undertaking a review of the role of popular music in improving perceptions of Birmingham. One of the drivers for this work is the recent report from UK Music on music tourism and its value to local economies (Destination Music).

The Committee is keen to understand how Birmingham, and in particular the City Council, can better support the city’s music heritage and current industry to attract visitors to the city and improve quality of life for residents.

The Committee intends to explore how to take forward work already completed, in particular around how those involved in creating, promoting music are brought together in Birmingham and what could and should the City Council be doing to support this.

There are a bunch of questions being asked – follow this link for those, some more info and some extra docs.

It’s actually a little tricky to find out about local music around the city, I find. This is the stuff I know about, feel free to add other stuff in the comments.

News

Brum Notes is the website for the free, monthly music and lifestyle magazine (Nov issue out now, Oct one online here).

The Birmingham Post have news and reviews here and the Birmingham Mail do rock/pop news.

Fused Magazine‘s site does the odd bit of music news, as does the website for sister magazine Area.

Surge Music takes a wider, Midlands-wide view of things, with articles and lists of gigs, bands and venues.

Cul-de-Sac turned out to be a false dawn for this sort of thing, but may come back one day.

@birminghamlive and @brumpunks are good sources for concert info too.

Reviews

Birmingham Live is the obvious choice here – someone from their ranks of volunteer reviewers and photographers will be at a gig in Birmingham pretty much every evening. Steve Gerrard organises this one (Lee Allen and I have also chipped in occasionally).

The Hearing Aid is a blog by someone called The Baron who goes to an impressive number of local gigs.

The Birmingham Mail do gig reviews too.

Get-togethers

The Birmingham Music Network meets monthly at the Department of Technology, Engineering and the Environment (T.E.E.) at Millennium Point. Their website has a good range of resources too.

Audio

I’m on shakier ground here – which radio shows promote local talent There’s Brumcast on Rhubarb Radio and Introducing on BBC WM. I don’t know enough about the shows on New Style Radio, Aston FM or any others.

Are there any Birmingham-based mp3 blogs worth talking about?

Anything else?

Let me know in the comments. Just to be clear, we’re not looking for bands/venues/promoters to plug themselves but if that’s you, where do you look to get featured?

Oh, and see also Birmingham listings.

(pic – The Editors by Steve Gerrard from the opening night of the new Academy)

From 4-6pm there’s the Birmingham Music Network with a networking event for the city’s music-related peoples:

The Birmingham branch of Musicians Union will be supplying luxury chocolate biscuits and good coffee for all. There’s food and drink afterwards supplied by the creative networks lot too. Come and talk about music and what you’re up to and meet some new people

Then after that, and until 10pm, there’s the Creative Networks networking event.  They don’t mention biscuits or coffee but do speak of “From Bedroom To Broadcast: How to break into TV and the battle to retain your filmmaking integrity thereafter” which is a talk by Lee Kern.  Lee recently set up a fake TV production company called Monkey Tennis to pitch ridiculous ideas to commissioners so he sounds ok to me.

Both events are free.  Here’s the flyer for the latter: