EFDSS aims to “nourish artistic innovation and excellence and develop the reach of English folk and new acoustic music in the UK and its profile internationally”, and we’ll be looking in particular at how it can support artists to build and connect with new live audiences. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more, or tell us what you think.

In the meantime, check out Folk Rising, a three-part concert series sampling the freshest, undiscovered and at times radical UK folk music, produced by EFDSS and the most excellent The Magpie’s Nest. The future sound of folk…today.

This year we’re shaking things up a bit, and are packing up our Phrased & Confused belongings to take over a stage at the award winning Summer Sundae Weekender festival, which for three days (8-10 August) takes over De Montfort Hall and Gardens in Leicester.

We don’t want to give the game away here, but we have got some rather special things planned and artists confirmed. For more information, check out www.phrasedandconfused.co.uk where all – well, some anyway – will be revealed.

For more information, download a flyer by clicking here. Be there or be a square, yeah!

Hosted by comedy duo Noble and Silver, you can expect fast-paced laughter and a thought-provoking show, packed with outspoken voices, slam poetry and comedy, banned songs and provocative texts, book covers and cartoons, live blogging and much much more.

One person’s insult is another person’s joke. Got a favourite insult or banned work? To insult or not insult – where do you draw the line? Please email insults, stories, poems or even song lyrics to insultingcabaret@gmail.com

For information on how to buy tickets and what else is going down at Free The Word!, click here to download a full brochure.

The organisation Sound Connections have launched an online survey that looks at the way young people ‘do music’ in London. The survey is live online until the morning of Monday, March 17th.

If you are a young person or work with young people, you could help out. You can access the survey by clicking here or visiting the Sound Connections site. All who take part in the survey will have the chance to enter into a prize draw with 3 Amazon or iTunes vouchers worth £50.

The idea of the survey is to gather research that will help shape future youth music projects, benefiting young people all over London. So remember kids, you’ve got to be in it to win it!

As part of this project we invited music entrepreneurs to take part in a region-wide survey and to help us work up our recommendations for how the two agencies could best support music businesses in the region. We had a great response, and delivered our full report to the Arts Council and Yorkshire Forward at the end of the summer.

In light of the research, ACE and Yorkshire Forward are currently considering how best they can support the region’s buzzing music scene. As part of this, Yorkshire Forward is currently working with the new Business Link provider, which will broker relationships between creative businesses and specialist business support providers from April 2008. The two agencies also decided to publish our main findings at this point, so that they can share them with music businesses, entrepreneurs and other business support agencies across the region.

In response, we have put together a summary report, Yorkshire Music: a report into business growth needs and ambitions of the region’s music industry, which can be viewed at http://www.thehubuk.com/files/Yorkshire-Music-Report.pdf.

For any additional information regarding this project, please send an email to: julia@thehubuk.com

Working with five festivals from around the UK, we have populated getmytickets.co.uk with out-of-date or fake ticket information to give potential users a realistic idea of what the site will look like and how it will operate. The feedback we gain from this exercise will enable us to make any necessary tweaks or changes.

Alongside the five festivals, we have also been working in partnership with the Association of Festival Organisers (AFO) and the British Arts Festivals Association (BAFA) to bring you this online ticketing service for independent festivals across the UK.

Interested in getting involved?
The site has been set up to allow fake tickets to be purchased. If you would like to help us out by buying some (don’t worry, no money actually changes hands!), then please get in contact us via intern@thehubuk.com and we will supply you with further details on how to do this.

If you’d like any more information about the project, then do get in touch with Jenny Harris here at the hub: jenny@thehubuk.com or getmytickets.co.uk@gmail.com

To help us to build a box office service and training programme that will be of real use to festival organisers, we are asking them to tell us about how they currently sell tickets. If you are a festival organiser, please do fill it in. It should only take you five minutes or so, and we promise won’t share with anyone else any of the information you give us. You can download a copy of it here, and email your completed questionnaire to us.

If you are involved in organizing more than one festival then it would be great if you could complete a questionnaire for each one.

If you’d like any more information about the project, then do get in touch with Jenny Harris here at the hub: jenny@thehubuk.com