West Midlands Music Pilot

This site is an early step towards the setting up of a British Library initiative: The New Music Network. The long term goal of the New Music Network is to systematically collect and document significant new music, in all its forms, across the UK. This part of the project, managed by Radio To Go Ltd for the British Library, has been in development for well over two years. It is an experiment, a test run, to try to answer some of the methodological and technical questions that arose in discussions with the British Library staff, and with our teams of local music advisors.

Hence the site name: ‘The Pilot Project’.

This goal is ambitious. But it would be completely wrong not to go for it. Amazing new music has emerged online, as musicians have both taken control of their own production and distribution processes. This is a significant cultural development: valuable and inspiring. It is also fragile: extraordinary work can emerge one day, and disappear the next. We want to ensure that the best new music is kept for posterity, with the blessings of the people who created it.

So how to do this? The first step was to rough out a solid way to identify new music. We went for a regional approach, as so much new music emerges from collaborative work in one area or another, and we picked the West Midlands as a particularly diverse starting point. This led to the selection of a team of advisors, all of whom work in or around the local music industry, some in specialised music areas. Our advisors selected up to 100 tracks each, and those tracks have been whittled down to the selection available on this site, and which will also go into the British Library’s archive. We looked for significant new music from the region that has emerged over the past two years, that was not on a major record label, and that was available online.

This is a curated approach: we rely on informed, individual expertise. This approach has its drawbacks: there is always the risk of missing something particularly valuable. That’s going to happen. We’re human; we make mistakes; our judgements may be wrong or debatable.

And that’s just fine.

We want to see debate about the selection of music that we present on the site. Crowd-sourcing is a distinct possibility in the future. That’s why we have included discussion areas. Click to go straight to the forum page, pick an act, or create a new thread.

And in an ideal world, when we hopefully roll out the project across the country, we plan to re-launch each site every six months or every year, with new selections front and centre. So if an act that matters misses out on one session, it has every chance to be included the next time out.

Part of this project is to test and experiment with new approaches to the selection and curation of music, and that principle also extends to this site. While the music content of this site is expected to remain fixed for the duration of the project – until the end of April 2011 – we will be continually evaluating what music is accessed, and looking for new ways for link up and expose different music genres. All of this is behind the scenes work, but it is work that could prove valuable as the New Music Network develops.

Robin Valk - Project Co-ordinator