Network Highlights Live Music

Independent promoters and agents organisation Network Europe says it will now be called Live Music Network because the new name is a better description of what it is.

It may also help boost a membership that’s more than halved over the last three years.

“There must be hundreds of European networks for various associations and organisations and the name Network Europe didn’t say anything about what we do,” explained Rob Berends, who co-founded the organisation in 1986. “By changing to Live Music Network at least people will know what we’re about, rather than us just sounding like an insurance group or a multi-national chemical company.”

Recently, Network Europe has had its organisational problems and internal scuffles. At last year’s Eurosonic-Noordeslag it emerged that Corrado Gioia of Hard Staff in Italy, Marc Lambelet from Black Lamb in Switzerland, and Tapio Korjus of Rockadillo in Finland quit amid a boardroom bust-up that had happened in Oslo in the fall of 2008.

Berends, head of Nijmegen-based Paperclip Agency, managed to put a new three-man board together with Attilio Perissinotti of Virus Concerti in Italy and Thomas Ryjord from Norway’s Storås Artist.

That was the biggest shakeup the Network had been through since it was founded, including when it switched from being an informal project to an official association in 2003.

The new board’s first task was to repair the financial damage the row looks to have caused, as membership had dropped from 73 at the beginning of 2007 to 41. The shrinking numbers looked to have cost around euro 7,500 per year, an unacceptable amount for an association that’s run on a shoestring budget.

Membership has fallen still further and is currently down to 31.