Taking place at London’s City Hall on 10 June, the programme will include discussion panels, breakout sessions and presentations about New Music Plus… Panellists will include Stuart Brown (BFI Southbank), Laura Ducceschi (De La Warr Pavilion), Jude Kelly (South Bank Centre), John Kieffer (Sound and Music), Penny King (Arts Council England) and David Metcalfe (Forma). Watch this space for full programme details, or email us to make sure of your place at the event.

The event will draw from our learning from the pilot New Music Plus… producer development programme which ran in London during 2009. Click here to find out more about New Music Plus…

In arriving at our recommendations, we mapped the support currently available to those musicians and other music professionals in England working, or wishing to work, internationally, and identified where the needs of such individuals and organisations are currently unmet.

the hub’s findings have been welcomed by both organisations, and they have already informed the new Memorandum of Understanding between the Arts Council and British Council and the Arts Council’s consultation document Achieving great art for everyone. On a practical level, the two commissioning organisations have also begun work in response to some of our recommendations, for example the suggestion of a more ‘joined up’ approach to strategic planning, showcasing in the UK and overseas, online intelligence and clearer communication of our international priorities. Meanwhile, recommendations relating to touring, internal professional development, evaluation and lobbying and advocacy will inform future developments.

You can find a copy of the executive summary, our mapping and gapping analysis of the current infrastructure in England and contextual information about the commissioning partners, along with their joint response to our research, here.

With just a couple of days to go to the Mayor’s Music Education Summit at City Hall, which we’re producing, we wanted to draw your attention once more to the GLA’s No Strings Attached Musical Instrument Amnesty, delivered in partnership with Time Out. If you’ve got an old, once-loved, instrument which you no longer use, then you can pledge it to the amnesty. To find out more, just go to timeout.com/nostrings.

Here we’re at hub towers we’re excited and delighted to be launching our new training brochure this month. It’s full of training courses based on client feedback about what they – and the people they work with – need, and covers areas such as business planning, fundraising, digital strategy and production, legal and finance essentials, creative production, music industry essentials making the Olympics work for you. Easily navigable, each section outlines example frameworks, content and learning outcomes, and it also talks you through how we work with clients to customize our training sessions to ensure that they provide exactly what’s needed.

As you may already know, the hub has a strong track record as a training organisation; over the years we’ve worked with music industry bodies and development agencies to train hundreds of artists, promoters, producers, label managers and others working in the cultural sector. In response to demand, we’ve done more and more training each year. We really enjoy training; it’s inspiring to spend time with other industry professionals keen to find new answers and try out new ideas – and it keeps us on our toes! As trainers, the hub gives people what they want: industry-specific training, full of relevant, practical advice and information that can be put into practice straight away; trainers who continue to do pay their dues and are generous with their knowledge, and plenty of opportunities for debate, questions and networking. All of our trainers are specialist ‘industry insiders’, who combine significant training expertise with up-to-the-minute practical experience of working as managers, producers, fundraisers, marketers or project managers.

Our Fundraising and Sponsorship courses cover everything from government funds to private investment; as the credit crunch kicks in and industry models shift, injecting cash into small businesses will be harder but all the more important. Our Digital Strategy and Production courses are a 21st Century reality check, explaining how to get digitally savvy on a shoestring, build a business-focused digital ‘toolkit’; check out the hugely popular Penniless Podcaster too! We cover the live stuff too – our Creative Production courses cover everything people need to know to make their events a success – the checklist, health & safety, logistic – the lot. Everyone hates business planning, right? Our Business Planning courses are renowned for cutting through the c*** and getting people inspired and on-track. The same is true of our Music Industry Essentials courses, aimed at artists and entrepreneurs alike, which show you how to make money from your music and grow your music business. Meanwhile our Legal & Financial Essentials sessions tackle contracts, copyright, legal and company structures, boards and governance, demystifying all that legal jargon. And, If you want to build your international know how, check out our International Arts courses, which explain how to work internationally, and – the one we all want to crack – how to make the Olympics work for you.

We hope you enjoy reading our first ever Training Guide; we’re very excited about it, and we’d love to explore with you how we might be able to work together. To find out more, give us a call on 020 7377 1373 or email info@thehubuk.com.

As the project was all about podcasting, we decided to produce a podcast as part of our project evaluation. Featuring original sound material produced by the participants, footage from the training sessions, plus interviews with participants and our trainers, you can listen to it by clicking here.

(If you can not access the flash media player above, visit ovi.com to listen to the episode)

Check out our flickr slideshow and a selection of related blog entries. Feel free to contact us for more info.

The young people were each presented with a final mix down of the pieces they have been working on over the past 5 weeks. It included interviews, stories, sound effects, live performances, groups projects, individual projects and of course a range of indents.Overall, the young people enjoyed the project a great deal and got a lot out of it, as did we, and hopefully, there will be plenty more to come.

Big thanks to Lou & Alice for coming in and enlightening us as to the inner workings of BBC radio production, also to Stuart, Sound Connections, Stratford Media Circus and of course, all the young people who took part. Well done everyone!

Next week, we will be making the final touches and presenting each participant with a finished product. Stuart has even promised to reward them with a bakewell tart each. We look forward vey much to these moments!

It was great to find focus with the young people and demonstrate to them how they could polish up their work using the editing suite – a kind of aural airbrushing! The addition of our in-house wordsmith Jasmine, meant the participants could really explore the relationship between writing stories and using sound effects. A rather extensive collection made it possble to add depth to their stories that featured Big Ben, horses whinnying, doorbells and more. We are building on the skills of the group and are moving towards a nice body of work.