Soundings

Soundings covers every registered creative company in the United Kingdom, swept from the Companies House register into sixty-five like-for-like region views from Cornwall to Shetland, each with its own database, map and regenerable evidence report. No comparable open picture of the sector exists.

The problem it solves is that our knowledge of the creative economy is stored in the wrong medium: static reports, commissioned once per funding cycle, out of date before publication. The official statistics are rigorous but annual, aggregate and blind by design to everything below the VAT threshold. Soundings is a system, not a report. Agents sweep the register monthly; every fact carries its source and time of belief; nothing is silently overwritten, so it can answer not just what we know but what we believed when we decided, and what happened next.

The deepest instance is the Liverpool City Region, where the register is joined by curated venues, festivals, studios and institutions and a full evidence briefing for the Combined Authority. That depth is the template: when a policy question arrives, the answer should be a query, not a commission.