I have a couple of questions...
The Lemon is the new home for Lancaster's independent music production network. It aims to make the world a better place for music producers in the Lancaster district by connecting them with each other and with sources of expertise from the mainstream music industry.
It is also a place where Lancaster can proudly showcase the wealth of its combined creative assets to the outside world and present the strongest case for artists, audiences and investors to get involved in making it a richer place still.
By our definition, a music producer is anyone who is involved in the industrial process that takes a music idea in the head of a creator and transforms it into a product or experience in the eyes and ears of a consumer (although they probably prefer to be called 'fans'). It is not limited to the profession of recording studio 'producers', but they are certainly included in this definition.
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In the real world it doesn't matter how good you are or how hard you work, for every successful musician there is a whole host of people standing back-stage who've been instrumental in the success. It takes a team. And The Lemon exists to help you find the perfect team for your project and for that team to learn everything they need to move forward.
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Every team will be different depending on the nature of the project. Generally speaking you'd expect to it to be made up of people from the following groups:
Artists: The people who write, play, perform and even mash-up music. So that's song-writers and arrangers, singers and musicians, DJs and MCs. These are the content creators.
Producers: The people who actively invest their time and resources in transforming music into music products. These can be a single live experience or a tour, a recording in any format, a t-shirt or even an iPhone app. So that's typically managers, booking agents, event promoters, record labels, sync agents, publishers, etc. These are the people who plan, organise resources and represent your interests.
Suppliers: The businesses, organisations and individuals that Artists and Producers draw on in order to make a music project really happen. For an artist to develop their product they need skills, instruments and equipment, rehearsal space, recording studios, graphic artists and designers, street teams, radio pluggers, press agents, royalties collections agencies, etc. Their products and services all feed into the finished product.
Fans: The people who love the music or the musicians, who will provide insightful feedback that can shape product development, who will spread the word more quickly (and cheaply!) than any advertisement, and whose (frequently irrational) expenditure on music products enables the other three groups to enjoy profitable careers.
Most significantly, one person can, and frequently does, fall into at least one of these groups.
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If you believe you fall into one or more of the four key groups in Q4, then we'd recommend it, for the following reasons...
Artists: Your priority is to concentrate on being a better artist. Every minute you spend on business planning, marketing or financial admin is another minute you are not spending listening, learning, practising, perfecting, performing and developing relationships with your fans. The Lemon will help you to find the people you trust to take on all other responsibilities. It will also help you to be found by organisations and individuals looking for creative talent for their project.
Producers: Your priority is to find artists you love enough to want to represent, and to create and seize opportunities that will support their careers. The Lemon will help you to find this talent, and for this talent to find you. Then it will help you to identify more opportunities, and to source the most reliable suppliers to make sure your projects are successful.
Suppliers: Your priority is to sell your products and services to Artists and Producers. The Lemon's directory is like a Yellow Pages exclusively populated by your target market. It will help you to find customers and customers to find you.
Fans: Your priority is to have a meaningful relationship with the artists you love, to gain exclusive access to content before anyone else, and to make sure the world knows about it. Helping out and acting as a street-teamer for your favourite band seems to be a mutually beneficial relationship. But what's more, Fans are frequently aspiring musicians, producers and suppliers themselves, so The Lemon will also provide knowledge and expertise to help you pursue your ambitions more professionally.
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Absolutely not.
The music industry has no minimum entry requirements, no formal qualifications and no established career paths. Everyone starts out as an amateur seeking a way to earn a living. A few people are fortunate enough to achieve this but this doesn't mean that they are the only people producing professional quality work. Aspiring bedroom producers are as valuable in Lancaster's micro-economy as established international organisations, but The Lemon will help them to think and act professionally.
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The notion of 'getting signed' is one which we believe to be outmoded and largely unsuited to today's environment. In a very small number of cases, pursuit of a traditional 'deal' is a viable option. Mostly it is not. 'Signed' or 'unsigned' are increasingly meaningless terms in a world where there is decreasing investment in new artists from major labels and their subsidiaries, where distribution and marketing channels are almost entirely democratised, and where everything is in place to enable those with an independent DIY attitute to achieve commercial success without relinquishing creative control. The Lemon will put all of these elements within reach and make them understandable.
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It depends on what you want to do with it. Most significantly, The Lemon is not another platform for public-facing self-promotion. Instead, The Lemon is for aspiring professionals to find each other, form teams and get more done. After that, you are free to choose the most appropriate way of promoting yourself from the many options available online.
Most other local sites we've seen are public-facing rather than industry facing; they provide local gig listings for pub-goers but don't have the functionality to enable information sharing with fan-lists. Global profile sites like MySpace serve well as electronic press kits, but are not very good for finding people or for being found. And although Facebook is good for getting the word out, this is only really useful if you are happy to keep spamming your 'friends'.
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The initial research element of this project is devoted to measuring the wealth of the music production resources of the Lancaster district. This encompasses Morecambe and Heysham, up to the Cumbrian border to the north, across to West Yorkshire to the east, and down to approximately Forton.
However, like anything online, there's no real way of being strict about geographical boundaries. Also, given the fact that The Lemon aims to connect the area to the mainstream music industry and independent production networks in other cities, it's in our interest to include content from far and wide.
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No. First priority is to get the Directory up and running. With this in place we will be much better positioned to consult users on what they want the site to do to facilitate their music production activity further. We envisage enhanced functionality for sharing and interacting the content, co-ordinating teams, calendars and task-lists, rating and recommending suppliers and service providers etc.
We will also be prioritising the use of RSS feeds to ensure authentic, comprehensive and constantly updated music industry content, so that all the best tips, advice and guidance are easily accessible for users.
Most importantly, The Lemon should enable us to maintain an ongoing dialogue around users' professional development needs. With a detailed understanding of that we are in a much stronger position to ensure that the best training and networking events, which rarely take place outside London or occasionally Manchester, are made accessible to people in the Lancaster area.
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It's completely free to visit The Lemon, to add and access the content, to browse and be included in the directory, and to do what you want with the information you find here.
But they say nothing in life is free?
Well, this website hasn't been built for free, and if it's going to be the fantastic resource we envisage it becoming, this won't happen for free either. But that's for us to worry about, not you. (Unless you're a potential investor of course!)
All we hope is that, when the site is all-singing and all-dancing, the value it adds to your music producing world will be so self-evident that you'll willingly pay a small annual membership fee to maintain those aspects of it that really make a difference.
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The Lemon is the brain child of Simon Harrison, Managing Director of Mushroom Concepts Ltd. Mushroom Concepts has put the last 12 months into developing this idea and won a lot of support along the way. Fortunately, some of the support was financial, and for this we have Lancaster City Council and Northwest Vision & Media to thank.
We also have to thank the team at The Storey Creative Industries Centre team for their support and work space. And Rich and Steve, the developers at Xevo, who have invested so much of their time making sure this system works and looks so great. And Charlie, from Hotfoot Design, who managed to translate a rather garbled design brief into a logo.
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We'd rather you decipher if yourself, but please feel free to submit your comments on this or any other aspects of the design or structure of this site.
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14 What do lemons have to do with music?
Nothing that we're aware of. But Lancaster Music Network is such a mouthful and the acronym didn't mean anything. So we just thought 'L.M.N.' A lot. And eventually it sounded like 'lemon', so that became shorthand for it. And it stuck.
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