Manchester music used to inspire tourists

Traditional brochures have gone hi-tech with the sound of Manchester now delivered direct to your mp3 player, iPod or PC. From today, 12th February 2007, visitors to visitmanchester.com will be able to download a free Manchester music podcast and share this with anyone, anywhere.

Marketing Manchester will post the first in a series of podcasts, featuring a selection of the best in Manchester music, past and present, together with invaluable, tourist information that aims to inspire people to visit the city.

All Out Productions have produced a series of six podcasts for Marketing Manchester, each one featuring the personal highlights of the city with an established Manchester musician. Guy Garvey, lead singer of Elbow, Peter Hook, bassist with New Order, singer-songwriter Liam Frost, and journalist John Robb are just some of the names currently recording for the next four podcasts.

Each episode will include musical highlights from a variety of Manchester artists, past and present. In addition, the podcasts will provide a platform for introducing some of Manchester’s new, up and coming music talent, as well as highlighting some of the most inspiring tourism attractions and developments in the city region.

The presenter of the first Manchester podcast is Mike Joyce, ex-drummer with one of Britain’s most acclaimed and controversial bands, The Smiths.

Andrew Stokes, Chief Executive of Marketing Manchester, says: “We are thrilled with this new and exciting tourism concept. We hope that the music podcast will be the first of many themed podcasts that will serve to make Manchester even more inspiring and accessible to both new and existing visitors.”

Peter Mearns, Director of Marketing and Communications at the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA), said: “Marketing Manchester is once again leading the way with this imaginative approach to marketing. Tapping into the benefits of new media to reach the next generation is vital if we are to grow and sustain visitor numbers to the Northwest.”

As well as being hosted on visitmanchester.com, the podcast will be emailed to over 450,000 consumers who have expressed an interest in music, specifically consumers in the US, Canada, the UK, Spain and Italy. In addition, the podcast will be sent out to some 3,000 people who are ‘friends’ of Marketing Manchester’s myspace page, myspace.com/visitmanchester.

The podcasts will be downloadable from visitmanchester.com/podcasts.