Music Business Seminar

Music Business Seminar

Presenter: Mark Graham

Chair: Carl Corcoran.

The MA Songwriting is delighted to host a visit from three ‘media moguls’ and present this Tower Seminar and Podcast on Music, Promotion and Social Media. Mark will host a live recording of The Irish Music Industry Podcast at The Irish World Academy with singersongwriters Síomha and John Spillane as his guests. Both John and Síomha will perform at the event, discuss how they approach their careers and detail the machinations of running successful crowd funding campaigns to release their music.

Both seasoned professionals and eager debutantes are using crowd funding campaigns as an alternative to record label support for recording and releasing their music. In 2019, songwriter and performer Síomha ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise €18.5K to fund the recording and release of her debut album. Síomha managed to raise €19.7K. John Spillane is something of a household name in Ireland, his song The Dance of the Cherry Trees is a perennial favourite on RTE Radio. John had been signed to EMI Records, but when faced with the prospect of releasing an album without record label support, he began a FundIt.ie campaign to raise the €25K needed to record and release 100 Snow White Horses. John reached his target in December 2019.

Mark Graham is a lecturer at Waterford Institute of Technology, author, musician and creator of The Irish Music Industry Podcast.