We’re partnering with Psych Fest to give our students a taste of life in the music industry

dBs Institute is delighted to announce our partnership with Psych Fest this year! Learn more about the festival, its story and our involvement this year here!

Here at dBs Institute, we try to mix academic study with real-world experience. Our incredible campuses in Bristol, Manchester and Plymouth are designed to reflect the environment of the music industry, our expert staff bring decades of industry experience into the classroom, and we encourage collaboration across courses to ensure students learn the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

It’s in this spirit that we are proud to announce that we are partnering with the Manchester Psych Fest this year to give our students a taste of life in the music industry. 

Set across 12 stages, Manchester Psych Fest brings over 80 artists and bands, from Goat and The Moonlandingz to Nadine Shah and LSD and the Search for God, to Manchester on the 30th of August. Joining this year’s team in some of the city’s most iconic venues, including Manchester Academy, YES, O2 Ritz and Deaf Institute, will be dBs Institute students from our Manchester campus to support the event and gain some valuable experience helping to produce a festival.

Speaking to us ahead of the festival this August, Owner, Founder and Director of Psych Fest, Gareth Butterworth, said: 

“Over the last few years, we've linked up with as many academic institutions as possible. We offer various roles, and specifically for dBs Institute, we're going to be doing some on-the-day positions. There are a couple of shadowing opportunities for sound engineers, so they get to experience what a hectic day working at a festival is like. Seven or eight bands are changing over, so if you do the full day, you're going to learn a lot. We’re also offering a couple of artist liaison and stage manager assistant positions, so they will see how the bands and artists are looked after throughout the day.

“We also do internships and we run a volunteer program, where we have up to about 50 volunteers on the day. Most of the interns who worked on a festival have either gone on to get paid work by the festival or are, at the very least, working within the music industry. We feel like we're a very good platform for people getting started out in the industry, and we're always open to helping and giving references and hopefully bringing in some work ourselves for them. We've got a couple of people working on a freelance basis this year who did internships last year. If you do well in your internship, you’ve got a good chance of building relationships and hopefully getting some more work in the industry.

“Working with academic institutes like dBs Institute is a good opportunity to get new, enthusiastic, young potential staff on board. A lot of them bring new ideas, which we continue to use today. It's great to have some fresh eyes and ears on the project.”

We can’t wait to see how our students get on! Learn more about Manchester Psych Fest and book your tickets here.