In November 2021 Music Export Ukraine started a year-long project BALTIC AID 2.0 in order to help local artists and managers to expand their career on the international level. Baltic Artists in Development is an artist management and innovation program by Musikcentrum Syd (Malmö, Sweden), Music Estonia (Estonia), Tak Brzimi Miasto (Poland) and Music Export Ukraine (Ukraine).

The program is aimed at self-managing artists and independent artist managers, and consists of creative events focusing on various music industry topics, music business innovation and local workshops, planned and executed by every partner organisation. The goal is to create a future platform where we can share knowledge and expertise.

Ukrainian participants:

• Yurii Bazaka - founder of Kontrabass promo and manager of artists: Ragapop / The Unsleeping / Stas Koroliov.
• Filipp Dobrov - mastermind of Robustfellow and manager of artists: Straytones, Shiva the Destructor and others.
• Bogdan Semenchenko - vocalist and guitar player of Komissiya band.
• Sofia Shvager - leader of one-woman band sophistication.

In Malmö, we met each other for the first time offline. Though the get together was spiced by the deep-dive workshops as:

• research lab with the very creative approach to get the core of the challenges in music industry;
• we met with the offline-only artist NOS in a conversation «listening to your intuition and not following the mainstream»;
• Eddie Walker from “WHYRE” talked about where to go with your creative ideas and about examples of new technology and new roles for musicians in the music industry.

Ukrainian event was held online. The program was saturated with team-building workshops, discussions and knowledge sharing sessions:

• we worked in groups on subjects like Concert organisations, Fundraising, Management, Composing together;
• workshop on artist-managers legal agreements and what to take into consideration while building a team, by Jake Beaumont-Nesbitt;
• workshop on storytelling and communication in your music project, by Jeanny Ricci;
• as an option, participants could take part in Selector PRO 2022 (international music industry forum).

No matter what, our journey continued in August with a stop in Krakow, where we were warmly welcomed by Tak Brzmi Miasto crew. Baltic AID 2.0 team joined Ikubator participants - a huge program for musicians and music managers in Poland. On day one they met Dominik Jaworski who talked about the journey from strategy to action and Olena Prokhorets who told more about Pomelody.co initiative.

Next day was dedicated to strategy - a powerful workshop held by Magda Chołyst. She turned it into an interactive educational journey full of surprising twists and bold experiments that were used to test and consolidate knowledge about the most important strategic modules: vision, mission, values, goals and tactics. Concerts, networking sessions, get-togethers and new opportunity - this trip to Krakow defintely became a highlight of this programme!