What We Are and What We Do:
We are an agency run by musicians who ardently believe in a philosophy of musical collaboration between talented musicians.
We are an incorporated and licensed UK based music sponsoring organisation that provides work permits (Tier 5 Sporting and Creative Certificates of Sponsorship) for international acts touring in the UK. If you are an act requiring a UK work permit go to our work permit page or email us at workpermits@cmeas.com. If you need to expedite a work permit please text 'work permit' to the work permit hotline: 07908 495549 (NOTE this number is for no other use). See Work Permit Directions to Artists for more information and permit fees. We have a 100% success rate for bringing musicians into the UK (last count over 60 acts) and have been awarded a Grade A Level rating by the UK Border and Immigration Agency.
We are an EXCLUSIVE organisation championing our roster of excellent original secular music representing many genres and many countries. 'Exclusive' means just that - we only work with acts on our roster.
Any act wishing to be on our roster must apply for a peer review for a chance to be selected. This can be done in one of three ways: apply directly, apply for an event, or propose a well thought out partnership idea.
What we do is promote specific events not only to our artist roster but also to the vast international musical community (yes, that includes the UK and EU) usually through our partner Sonicbids.
We coordinate music and music promotion for festivals (see One Planet Festival and Pewsey Festival) and run entire music festivals (see Lancaster Music Festival). Lately, we have been asked to help coordinate the new Glasgow Live Music Festival and have now started combining our band exchanges (see below) with festival coordination and partnering. More information on these initiatives as they fall into place.
We actively promote two showcase UK tours a year lasting about ten days each (one in Spring and one in Autumn) that are open to any original secular acts from around the world to apply for. We use these and similar events to recruit to our roster and broaden our partnership opportunities. We cover all expenses except international airfares (though we're always trying to find ways around that cost). We've been running the UK Autumn tour since 2001 and the UK Spring one since 2006 both without a break.
We partner with musicians interested in exchanging gigs (e.g. Cafe Bar 401 in Holland, Gandhi in Costa Rica, Wabash Cannonballs in Chicago, Big Walker in Sweden, Daze of Dawn in Spain). See partnership proposal for more information.
We book several venues on our circuit as and when those venues need our assistance (venue booking opportunities may or may not appear on this website but are always available to our artist roster).
We promote other events and bookings to acts on our roster that may not be listed on our website.
What we don't do:
We don't assist acts that are not on our roster. See above on how to apply to our roster.
We don't book unilateral tours. I.e. if you are an excellent band and want us to book you a tour we will refuse unless you are offering something in exchange. The word "exchange" is key. See partnership proposal.
This might seem harsh but we have our own band, three other bands we book regularly, the guy who runs this (me) also coordinates festivals (and answers your emails personally). We get about 100 emails a week from acts not on our roster who have not taken the time to understand what we do (and don't do) and want us to book them a tour. If you don't have something to offer in return please don't ask us to book you (and then you won't be offended).
When we promote an event that is the event. There are no other bookings associated with it unless they are specifically mentioned in the promotion. However, if you are a member of our roster, we will gladly let you use our venue list (which conveniently has the styles of music appropriate to each venue too) and let you use us as a reference. At some point we hope to be able to offer our artist roster such a large number of exclusive booking opportunities that they can indeed 'join the dots' and make a tour out of them.
We might consider helping you more if a) you apply for one of our events, become selected and / or do a superb job on our circuit (e.g. Big Baby Ernie, Wabash Cannoballs) or b) you offer us a partnership, e.g. a number of gigs on your own circuit for one of the acts on our roster in return for which they (or us) will return the favour.
Who we are:
We are musicians who understand the frustrations involved in travelling and playing music, especially internationally. We have our own band The Convulsions and it's that band's gig base that we share with other acts. Originally based in Chicago the founder of CMEAS, Ben Ruth, moved back to Britain in 2005 and re-registered the company in the UK to be able, among other things, to process work permit applications for highly talented international acts wanting to play in the UK, to take first hand control over our UK based booking, to start running music events and festivals and to establish his own act in the UK. We now aim to place the excellent acts on our roster in our venues, events and festivals in the UK and also start to increase international collaborations between talented musicians globally.