While at Unconvention last week I met up with Rich Dale, bass player in Befast based Escape Act. Rich has been invovled in the grass-roots music business in Northern Ireland for 15 year, and  was one of the coordinators at Unconvention in Belfast. With brands increasingly playing in the DIY and unsigned arena Rich gave me his thoughts on how brands can best work with brands at a grass-roots level. You can check out Escape Acts music here

Martin Atkins, legendary drummer with Public Image Ltd., Ministry and Killing Joke was one of the speakers at Unconference. He shared some of thoughts on the DIY music business as well as some of the insights from his new book Tour:Smart, the ultimate guide to the business of touring. Martin took a few minutes of his time to explain how he has sustained a career in music over almost 30 years, why the DIY ethic is still important and why the only contstant when it comes to the music business it change!

I attended my first Unconvention this weekend, a music conference for the grass roots music industry held in Salford, Manchester.  The first panel session I attended at the event, Outside The Box, looked at what it was like for those musicians and labels who choose to operate outside of the mainstream of the music industry, and what alternative ways they’d found that allowed them to be successful.

All the panelists had a different theory on what success looked like, but all of them agreed it didn’t revolve around massive CD sales or sold out stadium tours. For Caroline Churchill, aka Caro Snatch, “everyday I’m being paid to be creative, that feels like success to me”. While Abigail Seabrook, who has gone from being in indie bands to leading a unique 18th ‘pop band’ defined success as a process which has changed as she’s got older, but pointed out that she would tell her younger self that there are many more ways to make a living out of music than chasing the big record deal. Or as Steve Lawson put it you can have success without having hit records, then spending the rest of your life on a tour bus.

But they all agreed that all artists who choose work outside of the normal structure of a label/manage relationship that it was really important to have a plan and to keep returning to it regularly to ensure that you were achieving your goals.

But for this for this level of independence to succeed meant you also had to be resourceful, inventive and industrious when it comes to building and then managing the relationship you have with your fans. But as Steve Lawson put it “500,000 fans and no money would be a fantastic problem for any artist to have”.