Plan to protect Liverpool City Region music venues

The Liverpool City Region Music Board welcomed local music venue owners, managers and gig promoters to an event earlier this week which focused on ‘safeguarding and protecting local music venues’.

The event, at the Royal Philharmonic Music Room, encouraged attendees to share their opinions about issues currently affecting music venues and live music events. The key topics of discussion were: Agent of Change (local building developments and noise complaints), audience numbers following Covid, supply chain issues, energy costs and inflation, nightlife safety and issues involving night-time transport.

Representative of LCR Music Board and Head of UNESCO City of Music Liverpool, Kevin McManus, said:

“Protecting music venues is a key priority for the Music Board, so we were extremely grateful to see so many at from the sector at Tuesday’s event. All the insight and ideas documented will help the Music Board to better understand and support the sector, enabling us to continue lobbying around important issues, in order to protect live music locally.”

The event was hosted in collaboration with the University of Liverpool, who utilised the event to collect data about the city regions’ music venues and infrastructure, in order to create a digital map. As well as acting as a venue directory, the data in their digital map can be used by Liverpool City Region Music Board to support the post-pandemic recovery and sustainability of the region’s live music sector.

Dr Mathew Flynn, LCR Music Board Member and Lecturer at University of Liverpool, said:

“This intelligence about the different music venues in the city region will be invaluable to the Music Board; overtime it can be used to illustrate changes to the local live music sector and how it’s affected by certain policies and economic constraints.”

The band Shame performing at Future Yard in Birkenhead
Picture – Glam Gig Pics https://twitter.com/glamgigpics

The event, which was chaired by Louise Nulty, included a detailed explanation of the ‘music venues map’, a number of focus group discussions about hot topics affecting music venues, and also a panel session and Q&A with key policy makers and specialists: