The Forgotten County has long been the identifier associated with Donegal, that beautiful, weather-beaten outpost on the North Atlantic - economically and socio-politically forgotten, certainly to an extent, but can the same be said musically? It’s been a long-held notion that if you want to make any kind of dent in the music industry, the cities are where it’s at. They’re where the venues are, they’re where the broadest demographic resides, and they’re where most of the money diverted to the arts ends up. It can be difficult for musicians who are removed from perceived cultural epicentres to gain a foothold in the consciousness of the music consumer, but spatial separation is something that’s becoming increasingly less a factor in the seeking and sharing of sounds.

It’s notoriously difficult to get original music heard, particularly in a county as vast and isolated as Donegal. In recent years, though, things have slowly begun to change. The sorely-missed Drumacanoo Punx Picnic festival brought Irish and international bands to the outskirts of Letterkenny for a few years running, while the inaugural Distorted Perspectives experimental music and art psych festival took place in 2014 - and continues to build on that initial success - showcasing local and national talent alongside the like of Damo Suzuki, The ZZZ’s, Ulrich Schnauss, and Moon Duo. Events like these are few and far between. An annual event is commendable, but cultivating a network of collaborators all pulling in the same direction - musicians, venue owners, promoters, radio stations, and the music consumer – is the key to local artists earning a living through music.

I’ve been working in the music industry now full-time since 2005” says Mark Ponsonby, the driving force behind Donegal’s Andromeda Artisans collective. As a songwriter with three albums, a double live album and a lifetime’s experience in playing, teaching and releasing music under his belt, Mark is all too familiar with what it means to make a viable living through music. “I began in 2013 looking into the idea of establishing a music collective with some other local Donegal artists. Initially it began around the idea of sharing resources, but that quickly developed into a business model that we would use to release music regularly - and not just in local territories, but internationally as well.”

A chance meeting with a start-up business consultant in California helped Mark pull together the structure and model for what would become Andromeda Artisans, a music collective owned and operated by the artists themselves. “Gone are the days where you just play guitar and someone else babysits you through your career,” Mark says, “It’s a business like all others and should be approached in the same way.” Behind the business, though, is the crux of the collective’s ethos – the song itself, the thing that drives the entire industry and creates the link between musician and audience. The tricky part is marrying creativity with commerce.

Andromeda Artisans is currently home to a group of artists who have eschewed the traditional methods of aligning with a label or publishing company in favour of keeping their independence, artistic control, and crucially, 100% retention of rights. In Their Thousands’ Declan McClafferty elaborates: “It’s helped us organise and get all our shit together. I think when artists set out they have an attitude that all the power lies somewhere else. Realising that you make your own luck is the thing to do. This experience helped me figure that one out.” Like McClafferty, singer/songwriter Kate O’Callaghan describes how a musician needs to be a jack-of-all-trades - writer/producer/engineer/teacher/session player, the list goes on - in order to bring their product to the masses: “It would be too easy to just blame ‘the industry’ - the big record labels, the radio fat cats - because I believe it is ultimately in our power to always find alternative ways to get our music heard. We just need to keep being creative.”

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The owners of the collective themselves are clearly no strangers to the pitfalls of the jobbing musician, but they are better placed than most to plot new routes in the journey towards self-reliance. “The sole drive of this collective is to benefit the music creatorsColor//Sound’s Brendan McGlynn explains, another musician who makes compromises playing weddings and cover sets in order to pursue making music on a full-time basis. Charlie Doherty, frontman of post-rock band Clanns, elaborates on the point. “At times we have plugged our music to all the wrong ears, and as artists now we know that it is important to understand your music and know who is listening.”

It’s a recurrent theme among the Andromeda Artisans crew; the realisation that knowledge is power, and that while it’s not a path without difficulty, times have changed enough that technology can be a powerful tool in reaping the financial rewards from being the sole curator of your own creations. “This side of the industry has been in freefall for many years now and as yet nothing or no-one has managed to stop the bleeding,Our Native State’s Tommy O’Callaghan tells us. “Songwriters are paying for the lack of early adaption of digital distribution by the industry, and the value put on the art form is at an all time low.” For Andromeda Artisans, it is digital distribution rather than gig promotion that takes precedence; an offshoot of the costs of touring, perhaps, but nonetheless an approach that casts a wider (if less tangible) net.

There’s an all-in-it-together feel to this group of musicians, with a heavy emphasis on the collaborative effort and empowering musicians to take control over their artistic output. The spiritual base in the northwest of Ireland, though - the so-called Forgotten County - is no obstacle to the expansion of the collective’s reach. Donegal’s music creators are finding new ways to close the gap between the songs and the listeners, opening new channels of communication that make use of the wealth of online resources. “The internet has left us on a level playing field” Mark observes, “rather than being negative about the decline in music sales, instead we should embrace the age of streaming and digital technology so that our artists can reach audiences that will be able to sustain their careers for a long time to come.” It’s a difficult road ahead - the achievement of full autonomy in the face of established industry paradigms could seem like turning the metaphorical oil tanker - but then, as Kate O’Callaghan puts simply, “without difficulty there’d be no challenge, and that would be very boring.

Check out andromedaartisans.com for more details.