Starting to Share the Sound
Anna Stonehouse and Beth Hopkins (both year 2) have been working on a brand-new live music festival that will launch in March – save the dates! Since September 2014 a committee of enthusiastic Jazz and Poppers have been creating an exciting new project called Share The Sound music festival. The festival will be held on Friday 13th March and Saturday 14th March in The Talking Heads pub in Southampton. It is an annual live event created for new, unsigned and up-and-coming artists to make their mark on the thriving Southampton music scene. The idea of the festival is to amplify the artist’s profiles through complete integration with social media, giving both performance opportunity and exposure.
Anna’s take: I volunteered to be a part of the organisation as I wanted to experience actually running a festival, rather than performing which I am used to. I wanted to develop the skills necessary to use in potential jobs in the future, and being able to put on my CV ‘Artistic Planning Committee’ will be a great asset.
Beth’s take: Developing this new festival took my interest as I am a keen festival-goer and felt that this was an opportunity to reach out to an audience that would rather a festival than a gig, as it involves copious amounts of talented and diverse acts. I wanted to be behind the scenes in developing this new and exciting project, and help it blossom.
We have learnt throughout this process how to organise a festival with a large committee, what the different components to the administration of a festival are, and how time consuming it can be! From the outset it was clear that we needed to assign specific roles to committee members. During the planning stages, among the problems we came across first was finding the name for the festival. Names such as Springboard fest, Xposure and Demo fest were raised but they were all taken! Another difficulty was choosing the acts, as it was sometimes difficult to decide on, especially when each member of the committee had different music tastes. We endeavoured to create a diverse line up to suit everyone’s tastes. Finding the artists was not a problem as many Southampton University students wanted to play. However, timings were an issue which involved a lot of jiggling around to fit everyone – the line-up was revised a fair few times! After deciding on the lineup, managing all of the social media accounts and creating flyers – publicity – was the most important.
Check out our Facebook page and our Twitter account: @sharethesound_
We also considered the money aspect, whether we should fundraise to have a studio recording prize for the ‘best’ act, but we felt that this could stray away from the community message that ‘share the sound’ portrays.
As a committee we hope to continue and expand this festival year upon year. We would like to create a society to fund the festival with a dedicated committee to stimulate interest, as well as including a wider variety of acts outside of Southampton to generate a bigger audience.
We are both most looking forward to the event and seeing it all come to a head! It will be great watching the whole festival knowing that we have been a part of it, behind the scenes. Promises to be a great event full of a wide variety of music from jazz, latin, funk, pop, rap, rock etc! Tickets are £4 for the day £7 for the weekend online and £5 a day on the door. One not to miss! Don’t forget to #sharethesound!