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So the Arts Council England has unleashed its plan to save theatre for the under 26′s! Its called A Night Less Ordinary and is the the scheme, as proposed in the McMaster report, to give under 26’s free tickets to the theatre. You can find out information at www.anightlessordinary.org.uk

The first thing which strikes me, and I have to say I went to it pretty quickly once I found out that the site was launched, was that there are no Liverpool theatres included in the scheme!

I am in a city which statistically is far too well served with theatres but where none of them have signed up, or have been selected by the Arts Council to be included in the scheme. I have to say I was thinking of launching a theatre podcast. I’m not sure what I was going to talk about it in but I was probably going to be doing it on a Thursday on the back of The Stage being launched as it would probably give me something to talk about. This is exactly the kind of thing that I would include in it! I might do some digging to find out from Liverpool theatres why they aren’t in the scheme. You will be the first to know.

Talking of cultural wastelands. I used to be an avid user of the Podsafe Music Network which you can find at PodsafeMusicNetwork.com and we might have borrowed their collection agency exemption contract pretty much chapter and verse from their website, but having gone on recently to try and find music for our new crop of shows I have been bitterly disappointed.

It feels like it has been neglected for a while by Podshow, now Mevio (www.mevio.com), as they have moved from their audio podcast work to their shiney new video platform. Even the banner ads which are up their smell a bit off, like they have been in the fridge just a bit too long.

And I would just like to point out that this is a student podcast network, I know what I’m talking about. I threw out some things from my fridge yesterday (Monday 9 Feb) because their sell by date was November!

So it looks like we will be falling back on the support of our tame A&R Man, Mark (Merch) McNeill who’s blog you can get from this very site. Instead of having the podsafe music repository which was so proclaimed by Podshow at the time, we will be searching Myspace for content and then having to approach bands directly to get permission to play.

The PMN was meant to be a place where their reporting ability and their terms and conditions for artists and podcasters meant it was really easy for great content and great content providers to meet. It no longer feels that way. What went wrong? Many independent podcasters still sight the PMN as their destination of music choice, maybe they still have the monopoly on podsafe licences, but its not doing it for me anymore. Shame.

Would love to hear some feedback, and don’t forget: we need to play podsafe music that we have permission to play to you. That’s the price we pay for offering a podcast to you that you can listen to whenever you want. If you are an artists, send us your music, the link’s there are the bottom of the page.

Photo credit: MrPhilDog on Flickr

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Liverpool, Re:place Radio, Youth Engagement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.