The Great Escape festival is an absolutely massive weekend, the biggest of the year for our music blog by a some stretch. Not only do we have The Recommender’s own official showcase at The Green Door Store on Thursday afternoon, kicking off the weekend’s music in as much style as we can muster, but we’ve set about organising plenty more exciting stuff on top of the other very, very exciting stuff. It’s all so damn exciting isn’t it!?
The festival is a major event on the music industry calendar, known not only for the 300 bands that are performing, but also for it’s networking opportunities and conferences. On Friday afternoon at the beach-fronted Life venue we throw the doors open to any music bloggers who are in Brighton, for a get together called BLOG UP, in association with Hype Machine and Music Robot – two brands doing their best to raise music bloggers profiles around the world. It’s a chance for us to share tips, swap insider stories and grab a free drink between all the bands that are on offer around town. It takes our online networking into real life, where usually for most of the year geography stops us.
It also turns into an opportunity for music PR firms, managers and record labels to directly communicate with some of the UK’s key music bloggers, something they often find rather difficult to accomplish when approaching them online. Blogs get hundreds of emails each week and if our experience is anything to go by, we tend to spend more time on the emails from people we’ve actually met in real life, so for those people working in the industry they’d do well to get their promo material into the goodie bags we’re also handing out to these bloggers.
Beyond Blog Up there’s plenty more on offer at the Life venue, as during the whole day and into the night we are helping to host a showcase of bands for an event we’re calling JEAH!. It starts at midday and runs up to 10:30pm at night showing off DJs throughout and a total of eleven artists on stage. You can see the line up below, secured by the brands we’ve joined forces with; Killing Moon, Strongrooms Alive and Euphonios. All this is a fantastic example of how things get better when people combine. Together we are undoubtedly stronger.
You can hear the rest of our tips on our next blog post, with more details about our other official showcase, but in the mean time you are can hear us tipping acts on both Juice FM (hear that below) and again on Amazing Radio on Friday lunchtime.
