Line-up Selection | About Sounds from the Other City – Sounds From The Other City
Salford's festival of new music & art • 4 May 2025

Community Curation

SEEN's stage in 2024

At the heart of SFTOC is the creative community who have helped it to continually evolve for two decades. 

Our unique festival model means that the curation of the Sounds line-up remains in the hands of that community; each year we invite a selection of the region’s best promoters and selectors to book the artists that most excite them. We give them a stage and budget and the rest is up to them. 

Musicians & Artists

If you want to play at Sounds the best way is to be making a splash on your scene and chatting to other people who are doing exciting things. As we say above, booking artists is out of our hands…

Stage Selectors

Think you could programme a stage at the next SFTOC? We’d love to hear from you!

Maybe you’re a promoter, run a venue, a radio station, a record label, a magazine, or some other sort of creative selector – if you can make exciting things happen on a limited budget then you’re definitely the SFTOC type!

Drop us a line at [email protected].

Representation

Another reason that SFTOC offers the most exciting snapshot of the music scene in our region is that we want to see all types of artists represented. This isn’t a box-ticking exercise – simply put, a uniform line-up is a boring line-up and we’re not interested in that.

We also recognise that opportunities for performing at festivals are not equally distributed so we put it in writing to our stage selectors that they must contribute to our Keychange Agreement for 50% female and non-binary artists across the festival, and to ensure global majority artists are represented on every stage. 

We are also working to create better access for artists and audiences across the site and our communications. Find out more here.

Enthusiastically supported by: