Our Vision and Mission
We love music, working with musicians and making things happen. There are a lot of musicians in this region. Especially given the current challenges for venues, there may even be a bigger supply of (live) music than the demand is and it’s hard to stand out. We recognize there are quite some musicians or even musical groups & associations that have great musical talent, but less organizational and production skills or ambition. We want to help. As such:
The vision of Mexpo is to help amateur musicians in the region Eindhoven to expose their music. (getting it ‘out there’)
We can’t do this alone, of course. It’s our mission to build a network of local creators (photographers, producers, videographers) to support this vision. In a way, we’re just here to connect both groups. As such, we’re hoping to be able to provide facilitating services to amateur musicians that either don’t have the skills, means or network to arrange that by themselves. There are professional alternatives of course, but we’re targeting musicians that don’t have the exposure or quality (yet) to be picked up by professional production companies managers or labels to do that for them.
Target musicians include:
- Individual (starting) bands groups or individual performers
- Local musical associations or organizations that have focus on musical content, but are less well-equipped to do production themselves. These groups are typically limited to the few cultural institutes and venues that provide full production and venue hosting. We could offer more flexibility, tailored solutions and a wider range of activities to support local initiatives. We can also pick up booking outside of Eindhoven and as such create opportunities for musicians to widen their range. On the other hand we could help cultural institutes connect to independent bands and musicians.
Facilitating services include:
- Organize / host concerts or festivals to create specific opportunities for the musicians that are interested in our help.
- Booking services to put bands or combinations of bands at venues. We could provide technical support there as well to be able to make sharp and quality offers for ‘our’ bands to be competitive.
- Assist creating promotional material (supporting concerts we host or general promotional material)
- Assist creating audio and video productions.
The team behind it
We founded Mexpo with the 3 of us: Sjaak Thomassen, Nikita Voronov and Justus Janssen. Although there’s quite some organizational and music production experience in the team already, we hope many more fanatic creative minds will join our journey supporting local musicians. In the mean time we have found a group of about ten like-minded music fanatics : sound- light engineers, hosts, organizers, etc.
A non-profit
We’re a non-profit association. That doesn’t mean we offer services for free and expect contributors to invest significant amounts of time and effort without any compensation.
We are aiming for ‘fair compensation’ instead of profit.
What that means exactly we still have to figure out since we are a relatively young association.
However, we don’t want to introduce unfair competition with professionals by having low rates either. The reasons why we think we don’t include:
- We don’t typically aim to work with professionals that want to make a business out of services. That should allow professional (production) companies to differentiate. Although we do welcome a professional drive and professionals that are eager to support our mission on the side.
- We don’t target musicians looking for professionals, we target musicians that would else not pick-up stepping-up like they’d do with our help or would stick to a do-it-yourself approach. We think it requires a low (financial) threshold in order for musicians to be interested in that. In the end we hope that gives musicians a push to grow their exposure and ultimately reach a level where they would be interested to reach out to professionals instead of us. Thus we want to grow the market for professionals, rather than compete in it.