A very exciting project for music in the West Midlands is now live:
The Pilot Project started when local music enthusiast and one time BRMB broadcasting legend Robin Valk realised that with the ongoing demise of CDs and records, there was a danger that the best in new and contemporary music was no long being catalogued as it would have once been by the British Library. Conscious that there’s a staggering amount of quality music in the region that might not otherwise be around for ever, Robin has put together an amazing team and created the Pilot Project.
With a lot of nous and clever work from the guys at Carousel Digital, the team have created something much more than simply a time capsule for future music historians. Instead we have a wonderfully user friendly and accessible data base of hundreds of tracks of astonishingly high quality music in a vast range of styles.
I really urge you to explore this archive and experience the breadth and quality of music around – you can listen by style, search by region or look up your favourites and click on from there. Spend a few minutes on the site and you are absolutely bound to find some new artist that floats your boat.
Birmingham has long had an amazing number of quality artists in a truly diverse range of styles – so much so that the area’s very diversity has probably held it back in the sense of developing a strong, cohesive “scene”. But now, innovations like the Pilot Project offer not only a fabulous snapshot of where that scene is right now, but also a very real and practical method for enabling that scene, no, that community, to really blossom and grow.