Blast (venue)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (August 2007)

BlastSpace is Ireland's largest alternative youth community and event promoter.

Blast (now renamed BlastSpace) owns online creative network BlastSpace.com and runs the annual Blast:beat battle of the bands competition which have been running since 2003. Coca-Cola are the sponsors of Blast:beat in Ireland.

It organises concerts in Dublin, Athlone, Cork, Clare, Drogheda, Dundalk, Derry, Galway, Gorey, Kilkenny, Mullingar, Navan, Limerick, Sligo, Waterford, Thurles, and Swords. Blast has also branched out to the United States and Belgium in recent years.

[edit] Blastbeat or Blast:beat

Blastbeat was started in 2003 where groups of Transition Year students all over the island of Ireland formed their own Music & Media Companies ('MMCs') The companies are in charge of organising a battle of the bands featuring local musicians, where a panel of judges decide which band will go through to the regional finals.

The regional finals are held in Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht and the judges decide which bands will go through to the National final. The MMCs are in charge of advertising their bands and making sure that people turn up to the gigs to support them. The band which wins the National final is offered a record deal with BlastSpace records. The MMC that scores the most points based on continuous assessment and a presentation at the final wins a substantial cash prize.

Blast:beat also releases a compilation CD each year featuring bands which qualified for the regional final. Blastbeat funds the recording and production of the tracks and then ditrubutes the CDs in music shops. In 2006 Blastbeat got major distribution for the Blast:beat IV double CD through Warner records. In 2007 Blastbeat chose to release a single CD compilation instead with the best tracks chosen for the CD.

In 2006 Blast:beat had a six part series on RTÉ documenting the mini-companies as they took part in the Blast:beat competition. In 2007 Blast:beat filmed all the performances at the Vicar Street final and made them available to stream from the Blastspace.com website.

Winners: 2006 - The Impressionists. 2007 - Hotstop.

[edit] Blastspace

Blast originally ran the website www.blast.ie where they would post up news about upcoming Blast gigs and upload pictures from previous gigs. The site also featured forums where Blast members could interact. With the increasing popularity of personal-profile based sites such as MySpace and Bebo, the website was redesigned so that people could interact with other members of the Blast community on a more personal level. The site also features videos and recordings of BlastSpace and Blast:beat bands as well photosfrom Blast gigs dating back from 2004 to the present day. Despite Blastspace being almost entirely based in Ireland, the site mentions a worldwide community with intentions to branch out to other countries. In 2007 Blast:beat setup in New York, Los Angeles and Cape Town and the UK.

It is intended for Blastspace.com to play a major part in the 2008 Blast:beat competition, where bands would have to have a Blastspace profile in order to enter the competition and could go further in the competition with more profile views.

There was a part of the promotion of Blast:beat in Ireland where the Coca Cola Blast:beat awards were set up on bebo. Here the band whose song was added to most playlists on Bebo got the chance to go straght into the finals. BlastSpace members received reductions on tickets to the national final in May 2007.

To coincide with the launch of Blastspace.com, a record company was started called Blatspace records to help promote bands that were discovered and developed thourgh the Blast:beat schools competition and the Blastspace Live gigs. The label released Emily's debut album 'This Is Our Emergency' and Steer Clear's debut album 'No, You Hang Up' with both having minor success in the Irish charts. The winners of Blast:beat 2006,the Impressionists are also signed to BlastSpace records as are Home Star Runner who came third in the 2006 finals. The Home Star Runner album is due to be released in Oct 2007.

The plan for BlastSpace is to create a global network of creative young people who are also interested in being social entrepreneurs with the idea is that 25% of profits will go to help deserving charities such as mylife.org.za Beebs