Scottish Music Industry Association

The SMIA was incorporated in 2008 to foster, promote and serve the best interests of Scotland's music industry. Articulating our two core objectives as strengthening and championing the industry, we aim to achieve them through the activities listed below.

Across all genres - from traditional folk to cutting edge electronica - for a nation so small, our recording artists exert a disproportionate influence on the world of music. Through these artists and their albums, our music festivals and their audiences, Scotland’s innate love of music is recognised throughout the world. As our success and international reputation for the arts and music has grown, so too has the infrastructure and potency of our domestic music industry. A substantial and diverse community of music makers and users, Scotland’s music industry comprises a complex network of sectors, genres and disciplines: all facing exciting new opportunities but having to confront a myriad of challenges faced by the music industry around the world.

When The Scottish Music Industry Association (SMIA) was incorporated in 2008, it was in recognition of the fact that our industry lacked an effective trade body to assist in tackling these challenges and in helping to create opportunities; an organisation equipped to foster, promote and serve the industry’s best interests, ideally, where possible with a single, unified voice.

Finding that voice and articulating the concerns and aspirations of an industry as diffuse as ours remains one of the SMIA’s most formidable challenges but it is by no means insurmountable. It will require a sharpened focus on our common, rather than competing interests; a commitment to communicate and co-operate across all areas of the industry and, above all, a determination to deliver services, projects and a programme of events that is both meaningful and of benefit to our members and, by extension, to the industry at large.

By pursuing (and ultimately earning) a mandate from all sectors and genres within the industry, the SMIA has the potential to become an effective and powerful advocate on its behalf: connecting our members; encouraging trade; lobbying government; liaising with government agencies and generally promoting our nation’s musical endeavour at home and abroad.