MVT and Hearby launch UK’s first unified gig listings
Music Venue Trust (MVT) has joined forces with Hearby to launch the UK’s first-ever aggregated gig listings, using data from more than 900 venues across the country.
The gig guide, dubbed “the AirBnB of grassroots music experiences”, already lists more than 10,000 shows and almost 3,000 acts in the coming quarter.
The organisations say this is a major step forward in making sure that music fans can easily find and attend the best gigs no matter where they are in the country.
Hearby will also host MVT’s Venue Directory which has moved online for the first time since it was first printed, allowing its members to regularly update their profile and keep their following in the know.
“We aim to make an impact – to get a few more people to a lot more shows”
“We started Hearby because a lot of the live music we tend to go see is not aggregated anywhere,” Hearby CEO and co-founder Gary Halliwell told IQ. “And it just seemed like such a ridiculous friction in this era of search that people couldn’t find live music in their communities. And that is as a drag on the livelihoods of artists and the viability of venues.
“We aim to make an impact – to get a few more people to a lot more shows. We’ve created a fun live music discovery experience with new pathways into finding a great night out and we are expanding our footprint by rapidly distributing the powered-by-Hearby experience to newspapers, travel and tourism channels.”
Hearby describes itself as an AI-driven organisation with “a mission to map all live music taking place across the planet”. It uses modern technologies such as data visualisation, machine learning, and interactive maps and widgets to list events from live music venues from arenas to grassroots businesses.
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MVT makes £5,000 grants available to UK venues
Music Venue Trust (MVT) has announced a major new funding initiative, which will provide grants of up to £5,000 for UK grassroots music venues.
The Pipeline Investment Fund has been established with the support of members of the Music Venues Alliance and funded by donations from ticket sales of MVT’s recent Revive Live programme of gigs around the UK.
The fund, now open for all operators and organisations that meet any of the three definitions of a grassroots music space, aims to support venues in two key areas.
The first is small-scale capital applications (which includes lights, sound, access, ventilation and minor building alterations) and the second is staff and training (workforce diversification, succession planning, skills development and strengthening local community ties).
MVT says the fund will prioritise support for organisations that may be excluded from other available funding. The organisation is also actively seeking further donations to maintain and expand the fund.
“We have been working on music industry-based funding support for Grassroots Music Venues since 2018,” says Mark Davyd.
“This is the wrong time to take money out of the grassroots ecosystem, whether that’s for venues, for artists, or for touring”
“The launch of the Pipeline Investment Fund is an important indication of how the grassroots sector supports and nurtures each other. It provides a targeted opportunity for individuals, companies and organisations right across the industry to get involved and provide direct and meaningful financial assistance to the venues which support artists to launch and build their careers. We hope that the industry will see this as a real chance to make a genuine difference”
The news follows MVT’s sold-out Venues Day, which took place yesterday (18 October) in London, with 650 delegates including grassroots venue operators and booking agents.
During the event, MVT called on PRS For Music and The Arts Council to continue providing support to the grassroots live music sector.
The PRS For Music board recently voted to dramatically reduce funding of its PRS Foundation from 2024 and Arts Council England announced that it will be ending its Supporting Grassroots Live Music grant scheme in March 2023.
Addressing delegates at Venues Day, MVT CEO Mark Davyd said, “This is the wrong time to take money out of the grassroots ecosystem, whether that’s for venues, for artists, or for touring. We strongly urge PRS for Music and Arts Council England to think again. The number of opportunities for new and emerging artists to perform is absolutely vital to the future health of UK live music, and we need to see those opportunities financially supported more than ever before. This is not the time for cuts to funding”.
In other news, MVT and AI-driven company Hearby are launching the UK’s ‘first-ever’ unified gig listings from more than 900 venues across the country.
Hearby will also host MVT’s Venue Directory which has moved online for the first time since it was first printed (year, add history) – allowing members to regularly update their profile and keep their following in the know. Discover the gig guide here.
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Hearby launches UK gig guide in 36+ cities
Welcome to the Hearby gig guide, the most comprehensive source of live music across 36 UK cities and counting.
We’re a new kind of live music listing service. We use AI to cover all the live music shows going on in a city across every neighbourhood and music scene, from small, intimate local stages and grassroots venues to mid-sized stages and large arenas. We built Hearby because we were frustrated we couldn’t find all the live music going on nearby – in our hometown, Boston, and every city we have ever visited.
We’ve partnered with IQ to provide the go-to source for finding local live music as it returns to our neighbourhoods. https://www.iq-mag.net/hearby-gig-guide/ We are also supplying the data for Music Venue Trust’s grassroots show listings across the UK, which can be found here https://musicvenuetrust.com/gig-guide/
Want to help out, send us an email if your favourite venue or show isn’t covered and we’ll add it. https://www.hearby.com/help-us-out/
Our mission is to remove the friction that exists in people finding local live music that surrounds us by making show information available to all. If you’d like to find out more about how you can build your music loving audience with Hearby’s map and carousel, widgets including coverage of 70+ North American and European cities, contact [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.
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Hearby announced as final associate sponsor for ILMC
Concert discovery app Hearby is the final associate sponsor of this year’s virtual International Live Music Conference (ILMC), the leading global gathering of live music professionals.
Hearby, produced by Area4 Labs, is an AI-driven live music tracker which helps users find – and safely enjoy – live music as it returns.
The app allows users across 100 cities in North America and the UK to filter both in-person and livestreamed events by genre, time period, postcode and artist.
This year, Hearby plans to expand to a further 100 European and global cities with a goal to “get a few more people to a lot more shows” by widely distributing and licensing the app’s live music show calendar widgets to news, travel and entertainment companies.
“We are very excited to partner with ILMC and support venues and artists across the globe,” says Ian Condry, chief anthropologist for Area4 Labs and professor of cultural anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We want to remove the friction for people finding live music events in the community”
“We want to remove the friction for people finding live music events in the community,” he added.
Hearby will be showcasing the product from a virtual exhibition area at ILMC, which delegates will be able to visit.
This year’s conference, dubbed ‘Virtually Live’, will welcome more than 1,000 registered delegates and host more speakers and meetings than ever before thanks to its limitless virtual format.
ILMC 33’s new features include video speed meetings, a digital trade exhibition, ‘watch again’ conference sessions, and live voting and polling. And for the first time in our history, non-members will be invited to attend ILMC, pointing to the busiest live music conference ever staged.
Irving Azoff, Bob Lefsetz, Sam Kirby Yoh, Emma Banks, Tim Leiweke and Klaus-Peter Schulenberg are among the confirmed speakers.
Browse the speakers and sessions online and register for ILMC here.
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