MusicSeen: How A Liverpool-Born Initative is Uniting The Music Community
MusicSeen was born from Connor Di Leo and Nina Himmelreich’s shared desire to make Liverpool’s music scene more connected, visible, and inclusive. Drawing on their experiences at LIPA and Nina’s research into gender inequality in music, the platform began with a simple list of local FLINTA artists and has since grown into a vital hub for musicians, fans, and industry professionals.
With searchable databases, curated playlists, and a strong focus on community, MusicSeen is helping to build a more collaborative and informed local music ecosystem. Since our interview, they have announced the launch of their new Events & Venues Database, pulling together 700+ monthly gigs into one free, filterable platform.
We caught up with Connor and Nina to find out all about MusicSeen.
What inspired you both to establish MusicSeen, and how did your experiences at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) influence this initiative?
Nina: We found that information on the local music scene was spread across way too many platforms, making it really hard to know what is going on locally outside of one’s immediate circle. On top of that info that is on let’s say Spotify or Instagram cannot be searched via location, so even if you wanted to find local artists you would have to know where to go looking for it.
So this is where the idea was born really. Although to give you a little bit more background, I am a researcher in the field of gender inequality in the music industry, which stems from my own experiences as a woman in music over the years, and at the start of the pandemic I felt a real need to change something on a local level, where I could potentially have an actual impact.
So this is when I got in touch with Connor to just have a chat about doing live sessions of local FLINTAs in music. From there on out it became really obvious that we were both passionate about supporting the local music scene and after many months of chatting through our ideas, MusicSeen was born, or at least the foundational idea for it, with the first list of local women, nonbinary and trans musicians for International Women’s Day 2022. From there we developed our idea further and finally turned it into what it is today.
In terms of how LIPA influenced our initiative, the key thing is that we both met there. And I guess that is what LIPA does best, enable connections and collaborations between creatives of all kinds. I think something I really noticed as a Music student, and even now as staff, is the slight silo mentality going on with LIPA, or also called the LIPA bubble. This is not unique to LIPA, but I can see this across the city and several different ways, but this was also a key inspiration for our platform.
Rather than competing with musicians locally, we want to encourage collaboration between people (which of course is also happening extensively but can you ever get enough of that?), and then in turn have Liverpool stand out as THE music city in the UK, to enable us as a whole community to compete with London or Manchester. We have so many talented folks in the city, and we truly believe if people knew about everyone in the city, it would enable more work to stay within the region and in turn help the community thrive.
MusicSeen’s Collab with Dead Air Vinyl, bringing you their rundown of some of their favourite artists on the Liverpool music scene.
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How does MusicSeen facilitate connections among musicians, industry professionals, and fans within the Liverpool music community?
Nina: The key thing for us is knowing who is even in the city. That was our starting point with the databases. Simply listing everyone who does music or is involved in music in some capacity enables people to look for collaborators locally rather than branching out to other cities. This creates a tighter knit community, and supports the local music economy.
On our website you can find the artist database, where you can search for local artists, by genre, or underrepresented characteristics, you can use the professionals database to find technicians, engineers, promoters, videographers etc. to work with local individuals, and on the events database you can find over 700 monthly events taking place in our beautiful city. We believe by knowing what is happening locally, audiences can make informed decisions to support the local music sector, creatives can actively decide to work with other local creatives and tourists can easily find out what is happening locally to diversify their engagement with local music. For us it is all about making things visible (MusicSEEN) and as a consequence drive engagement. The platform hosts a database of over 2,000 local musicians and various curated playlists. How do you curate content, and what criteria do you use to feature artists?
Connor: So we hand-research all the artists on our database. Any artist can be added to the database so long as they (or a member of the group) is based within Merseyside. Everybody is welcome, the more the merrier! Every artist on our database with a Spotify profile is tracked each week automatically for new releases and adds the first track of each new release to our ‘Liverpool New Music” playlist on Spotify. Then, every Friday, a MusicSeen team member called Zak Hammond organises the new releases into genres, moods and our underrepresented voices playlists. Currently we maintain 12 genre playlists, 5 mood playlists and 2 underrepresented voices (FLINTA and Global Majority) playlists.
Can you elaborate on the upcoming features, such as the jobs board and the grassroots music conference, and how they will benefit the community?
Connor: We have just announced our events database! Which tracks 10+ ticketing sites for events, as well as recurring events/open mic nights from the 700+ venues on our venue database. It also autoposts daily events listings on a dedicated instagram page: @liverpool_events_database.
We also have the following databases live on the site:
- Artists
- New Music
- New Video
- Venues
- Professionals
- Organisations
In the future, we have ideas for a jobs board, merch shop (for bands) as well as recommendations and other useful ways to navigate our data. We strongly believe that having this information available will benefit the scene by enabling people to get a big picture view of what’s happening within the scene and then make better informed decisions on how they want to engage with it. Be it through new releases, events or networking, MusicSeen has the information needed for people to get stuck in. It’s our priority to make our data as accessible and easy to navigate as possible.
Nina: With regard to the conference we are still playing around with ideas for it, as we really want it to be a workshop day for local creatives to get stuck in on creating solutions for issues that are facing our local sector. We are currently conducting interviews with professionals in different areas (such as our already released interviews with promoters, record shop owners and many artists) to capture what everyone thinks could work better locally. The conference will then be a place for everyone to get together, discuss the outcomes of our interviews and hopefully find solutions we can enact as a community.
MusicSeen emphasises amplifying voices of female, non-binary, trans, and global majority artists. What motivated this focus, and how do you ensure these artists receive adequate representation?
Nina: As previously stated I am extremely passionate about gender inequality in music and finding ways to level the playing field, and supporting underrepresented voices in music. The original idea was simply to create a list of local creatives, inspired by Vick Bain’s work on the F-List, to show to promoters, bookers, radio hosts etc. “hey look at all these women you could book and work with”, and as a consequence create a more balanced local scene.
So we created the yearly International Women’s Day list in 2022, featuring women, trans and non-binary artists in the local music scene, mainly as a resource and tool for others to diversify their booking practice or their network. It is incredible to see how much the list has grown since then, in 2022 we had just over 200 artists on the list. In 2025 we had over 600 names listed and it keeps growing. While this might just mean we have done better research since and people are actively submitting to our database,
I do see this as a really positive development in our city. Particularly the feedback we have received and the interest in the list has grown significantly and we have people tell us, oh this enabled me to book more diverse line ups or people pointing bookers in the direction of the list or database to use it as a resource. But I do think the list and filterable database is also only the beginning, it is one step in the right direction, but we want to pursue more plans to support FLINTAs in the local music scene.
Artist Astles sharing some of his favourite Liverpool musicians.
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How can individuals and organisations support MusicSeen’s mission and contribute to the flourishing of Liverpool’s music scene?
Nina: There are plenty of ways. One use our website to engage with local music, and please do submit to our databases as we know we can’t have found everything that is going on. All our databases have a submit section, so if we missed an artist or an event please let us know. Particularly the professionals database has a long way to go, so if you are a local music professional please submit your listing!
We are always looking for volunteers to help with database upkeep and other upcoming work, so if you love local music and want to get involved please do send us an email, we’d love to have you on board.
Of course, as a small CIC we are always looking for investment for our next idea, so a little donation is always a great way to support our work. We are also actively looking for sponsorships, so if you are interested in sponsoring our work and showcasing your own work to musicians, do get in touch with us, we would love to chat.
Finally, and maybe most importantly support local artists directly. That is where our inspiration for the project came from and that is the key to a thriving local music scene. Go to local gigs, and ideally buy tickets in advance, to support venues, promoters and artists. Buy music by local artists on Bandcamp, share their work and express your support. Bring friends to shows or show them local artists, and diversify your listening habits, maybe for every 2 big artists you listen to, listen to one local act?
To find out more about MusicSeen visit musicseen.info and follow @musicseen.info on Instagram.
