Birmingham: It's Not Shit

Brum Music Map

Please help us, and the Birmingham Music Archive build up a “music map” of Birmingham. We’re looking to map anything; bands, singers, musicians, promoters, managers, venues, record shops, music shops, hangouts, anything that has a “place” and that place in in Brum (or nearby).

There are lots of reasons for doing it, mainly that it’s great to have a record of such stuff — we could use it as the basis of research, art, or displays or, well tons of stuff.

But there’s something special I want to do with it (’tis a secret) , and I want to be able to do it before the end of the month. June is, as we’ve been going on about, Birmingham Music Month — and it would be great to have a load of this done come July.

So, we’ve created a Google map, and started to add stuff to it — and we’d like you to help as much as you can.

View Birmingham Music Map in a larger map

How to add stuff to the map:

You’ll need to have a google account, get one or sign in and then pop along to the map itself.

To add things, first you need to go into ‘Edit’ mode. Click on the button:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Click the Placemark button. Your cursor changes into a placemark icon with an “X” crosshairs. The crosshairs indicate where the placemark will fall.

Move the cursor to the appropriate location. If you want to dismiss this placemark, press the Escape key.

Click your mouse button to place your placemark. It should bounce into place.

Add a title (name) and description (if needed).

Change the icon for your placemark by clicking the icon in the top right corner of the info window. Here’s what we’ve been using so far:

= a woman — promoter, band member, manager, solo artist, anything

= a venue, gone or still open

= media — did they show, record, write about, release music?

= a man — promoter, band member, manager, solo artist, anything

= a hangout — not a venue, but associated with music in some way. eg. recording studio

= a band — you have to conceptualise where they’re from. eg. Black Sabbath are placed on the location of the cinema from where they took their name.

= a shop, tunes or instruments…

Click OK to save your placemark.

Click Done in the left panel when you are finished.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 8:05 pm by Jon Bounds and is filed under Birmingham, culture, history, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.