I spent months mapping out music industry contacts in Manchester. Here's what I found (and why most unsigned bands never reach them)
Background: I'm a musician based in Manchester who got fed up with not knowing who to actually contact to move my career forward. Labels, venues, promoters, press, radio, bookers. They all exist. Most unsigned artists have no idea how to reach them or even who they are.
So I started building a database. Not scraping Spotify or following Instagram accounts, actually researching, verifying contacts, finding the right person at the right place.
Here's what I learned:
Most unsigned bands are emailing the wrong person. Band on the Wall has a booking contact. BBC Introducing Manchester has a specific submission process (Thu and Sat 8pm, all genres). Bandwagon Press has a named PR contact. None of this is secret. It's just buried.
The music industry in a city like Manchester is smaller than you think. There are maybe 30-40 people who genuinely move the needle for unsigned acts. Venues, one or two key promoters, a handful of press people, a couple of decent booking agents. If you can get in front of those people you're in the game.
Cold emailing works if you do it right. Short, specific, no attachments in the first email, reference something real about what they do. Most artists send essays. One paragraph gets read.
The contacts aren't the hard part. Knowing what to say when you reach them is. Do your homework on who they've worked with, what they care about, why you specifically are relevant to them.
I ended up building this into an app called Neufia, we've got 115 verified Manchester industry contacts in there across labels, press, venues, bookers and radio, and we're adding cities. It's not the point of this post but if anyone's curious it's neufia.com.
The actual point: stop waiting for the industry to find you. The contacts exist. The access exists. Most unsigned artists just haven't done the unglamorous work of finding out who's actually worth reaching and what they actually want to hear.
Happy to answer questions about the Manchester scene specifically or the outreach approach if useful.