Congratulations were given to Raphael Selbourne for winning the 2009 Costa First Novel Award and we came across The Music Quarter, a new music blog.

Hustle made the move to the Midlands, we had a giggle with Kipple and the Emerging Festivals Fund was announced, with some of the fruits of that being revealed towards the middle part of the year. Leftfoot started their 10th birthday celebrations and our most popular post of the year was published.

Ian joined the CiB team, we got the first glimpse of WeVee and plans were announced for the CiB shop

We also waved hello to Jane Anderson, Mark Wilkinson, Lucy Pryor, Phill Blake, Helen Flanagan, Sarah Lynch, Jade Sukiya, Jodi Ann Bickley, Leon Sparkes and Luke Halliley.

We also said farewell to Neil Farrington.

Might this be useful to the folks at the recent The Challenge of Change event? So what sort of small festivals is the city currently lacking?

It’s probably worth seeing this in light of the comments from Neil Rami of Marketing Birmingham that I linked to the other day. When asked which cities have marketed themselves effectively through culture he named Barcelona, Berlin, Glasgow and:

Rotterdam, as they have come from nowhere. They have spent eight years capacity building their ability to host festivals and in that time have gone from something like 8 each year to 109. They saw festivals as a way of building a career for an artist and for telling a story. They now import festivals, poaching them from other cities as well as starting their own.