Creative SME's in the West Midlands are being offered grants of up to £10,000 to bring innovative ideas to life, as part of the newly launched CreaTech Frontiers. BCU Business Services asked Jez Collins, Founder and Director of the Birmingham Music Archive, who attended the launch, to tell his story about creating a Brummie musical legacy.
Birmingham Music Archive
The Birmingham Music Archive is a creative and cultural organisation that captures, documents, celebrates and shares Birmingham’s music history, heritage and culture. I started it as I felt our music culture and the stories that surround it remain untold, out of sight and out of mind in the national and international consciousness (even amongst us Brummies!). Unlike other cities such as Liverpool and Manchester for example, we don’t shout about the individuals or the communities that have contributed to local, national and, in a number of cases, international music culture and I want to change this!
Birmingham is the home of reggae, metal and indie, of ragas, qawwali and bhangra, of jazz, rap and folk and 1000 other different sounds and we should celebrate and revel in this. Our music culture is a product of our environment, our communities and our neighbourhoods and the fusion and infusion of the cultures and sounds that surround us every day of every year.
Across the BMA’s various platforms people upload memories, stories, photographs, posters, ticket stubs, magazines, news cuttings and other materials that relate to the bands, venues, record shops, managers, promoters and anything and everything connected to music and Birmingham.
Birmingham Music Culture
I then turn these materials into public facing exhibitions, installations, films, podcasts, records, articles, interviews, policy, placemaking and cultural activities. Our projects have reached an incredible audience total of 465,750 for our physical events and an astonishing 100,826,946 via our online projects. There is definitely an audience for Birmingham music culture!
These activities led me to work with developers and investors on cultural infrastructure and placemaking strategies as part of their planning applications and for their proposed schemes.
One of these relationships led to a strategic partnership that has resulted in the developer building the shell & core of a museum space and offering a 50% market rent reduction in perpetuity for a music museum. This is a pretty unique outcome for Birmingham that highlights what can happen when culture is embedded into the world of development.
Birmingham Music Experience
But what does a start-up Birmingham Music Museum look like? During the research and development stage - we are due to open in 2027/28 - it has become clear to me that opening a ‘traditional’ museum is next to impossible; financially and practicably. Issues around space requirement, acquisition of items, conservation and preservation costs, security, storage, insurance are all huge expenditure items as well as requiring staff expertise across these areas. Then there is the challenge of charging entry fees to an object led museum. There are examples out there but it would be a difficult thing to get right.
And this is where CreaTech Frontiers comes in. I’ve pivoted away from the ‘traditional’ museum idea into what can be thought of as immersive experience. And so I am now moving towards opening the Birmingham Music Experience.
Let me explain.
The way audiences, particularly Gen Z, are consuming culture is increasingly via digital and immersive experiences as can be seen in the world of art. While there will, and always should be, the need for museums and galleries to exhibit and interpret the physical objects associated with art, the shift to more immersive experiences is bringing in new audiences. I was pleasantly surprised when I went to the Van Gogh Immersive Experience at the Hippodrome a few years back, both for the way the art was presented and the totally different audience that I was sharing the space with.
Creating an immersive, audio, visual and story driven sensory experience about Birmingham and our music culture, the people and communities who have shaped, made and consumed it, and exploring how our music defines our city, is incredibly exciting and something that I don’t think exists elsewhere. I want to take the materials in our archive to create something unique for the city but I need help and support from the CreaTech community to achieve this. I’m learning new skills, technical language and the possibilities that lie ahead but it has to be in collaboration, with experts who can share their knowledge, who have the same passion that I have to create something unique for Birmingham. Something that will speak to Brummies but also appeal to and attract visitors from outside of the city.
This is why I was so excited, and happy, to hear of CreaTech Frontiers and to find out more about it.
CreaTech Frontiers
CreaTech Frontiers is a 5-year £7.2 million project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation. It aims to drive research and development, business innovation and skills by playing an instrumental role within the creative industries ecosystem across the West Midlands.
Led by Birmingham City University with Coventry University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company, the project is creating a network of four complementary, interconnected research and development labs in immersive audio and video technologies, virtual production, applied AI for createch and gaming, esports, and animation. Funding Call announcements will be released from Monday 2 June 2025.
To register your interest in CreaTech Frontiers, please visit the website.
