Sheffield City of Music event 14th-Oct-2026

On a proposed Sheffield Office for Music

See also: Neil McSweeney's Sheffield City of Music Report 2026 for Sheffield Council

Joe Kriss, Opus.

"Setting it up: the choices in front of us."

Proposal to create a Sheffield Music Office.

Where we're up / what we've learned.

Neil McSweeney: music is so deeply embedded that it can get a bit fragmented - it can difficult to see the whole. And difficult to communicate across all of it. We can't comm about opportunities / difficulties we face. So we leave value on the table. Causes unnecessary fragility.

Independent Venues Alliance
Harmony Works

Music office: make it visible, join it up, help get funding.

Report was to support incoming culture team at Sheffield Uni.

How to do a full economic analysis? Yeah.

There isn't a logic for a single org to do the super-connector thing.
Superconnectors not always equitable.
We are not talking about the 'northern music export office'
Sheffield is a manageable scale for a super-connector.

Interviews done by Opus in Liverpool, GM, Sunderland --> no single model.

Proposing a pilot. Starting with:
coordination/intelligence - maintain living picture of the ecology / look for aligned opps
investment - spot opps, coordinate bids (who might be able to work together)
Audience visibility: city wide discovery service
Advocacy + policy
Find its own sustainable business model
City or region scale?

We can borrow things that worked best / will work for us.

Six design principles:

Small orgs - don't have incentive or time to get resources. So how can office of music help that?

How to keep moving / how to learn more now:
Set up with host org that can host finance etc.
Then becomes its own ltd company. Before end of pilot.

Host needs to be neutral.

Neil: UK govt has just announcing turn it up - big pot of money. Funding delivered by Arts Council, by the look of it.

Neil: break up cliques - the informal links.

Joe: regional / national frame funding...
Arts council regional team

How to build full GVA analysis for sector?
Neil: we do increasingly have frameworks for assessing all kinds of impact

Neil: "when you become a person identified as able to do things, they get so overloaded..."

Issue of places that close down that become centres... boardwalk etc.

Why is it harder to get info around ecosystem? There was lots of shared fora - even local papers. But it's not there now.