Digital Projects

New platforms and new models connect creators and consumers; it’s all up for grabs

Digital technology is revolutionising the way we all create, distribute and consume culture. For those working in the creative sector, this unparalleled pace of change means that business models are being over-turned and supply chains re-drawn, often on a weekly pace. In music, record labels in particular are racing to reinvent themselves, while across the creative sector venues, galleries and museums are facing up to the need to think creatively about what their virtual ‘offer’ should be, how they harness technology to create new distribution channels as well as new ways of reaching new customers as part of an online community.

Our digital team can help other creative businesses because we’re busy trying to answer the same questions ourselves

Our digital team has been built on the same ‘think and do tank’ model as all our other teams. Each member of it is as a practitioner themselves, working as a film maker, music producer or designer, and combining their own practice with the role of consultant and trainer. We can help others to answer the questions they have about how they should be using digital technology in their business, because we’re busy working out the answers for ourselves too.

Our digital ‘hub lab’ projects
At the hub, we use digital technology across all areas of our work – in our work as creative producers and researchers, as well as to help us interact with our peers and online community. It’s simply part of the toolkit we put together for each project, and informs the advice we give to our digital clients.

However, we also have a number of digital R&D projects, which form part of our ‘hub lab’. Get My Tickets is an online ticketing and audience development resource we’ve recently piloted and are looking to launch later this year, as a means of developing the marketing capacity and ticket income of independent music promoters and festivals. Podcast Connections is a skills development project we recently ran with a group of young musicians with learning difficulties, which aimed to build their podcasting skills, so that they could better promote themselves to audiences and industry professionals. We also chose to produce as podcast as part of our evaluation of the project.

Our digital clients
What is TV? That’s the question we spent a considerable amount of time thinking about last year, as part of our work to scope out the model for Creative Partnerships TV, a community-based tv station. We recently got our hands a bit more ‘dirty’, producing the first in what will hopefully be a series of podcasts for The Stables, one of the country’s most renowned small scale music venues. Like a lot of venues, The Stables is grappling with how to use technology to drive audiences to its live events, as well as another ‘virtual space’, and this was their first step. And later this month, we’ll be producing the first of three podcasts for the first leg of the SEAS project, a multi-artform touring project taking in 15 countries along the North and Black Sea coast across 2009 and 2010.