Music to your ears...Business set to boom for Northern Ireland recording studio with major expansion

News Letter

A Belfast recording studio is set to capitalise on the boom in locally made podcasts as it responds to an increasing number of entertainers and businesses seeking to produce their own content.  The expansion for 1620 Audio, the studio behind some of Northern Ireland’s best-known podcasts, including the Mudblood Podcast featuring comedians William Thompson and Paddy McDonnell, follows grant funding from the government-backed business support service Go Succeed.  Based at the Innovation Factory in the west of the city, the business was set up by first-time entrepreneurs Sean McDonnell and Luke O'Neill in 2023.  In addition to recording the podcasts, 1620 Audio, edit and distribute them, and create social media content to promote each episode.

Transcript

00:00One, two, one, and go!

00:02We're going right, it's how we start skiving off from work

00:05or we actually just go full pelt at this.

00:11I'm Sean McDonnell.

00:13I'm Luke O'Neill.

00:14And we're the owners of 1620 Audio.

00:17Our main focus is providing a one-stop shop for anything podcasty.

00:23Sean and I have both known each other for years.

00:25A couple of years ago when we were both working our jobs,

00:28Sean's brother had started doing a podcast.

00:31Every week he was ringing him going,

00:33How do you work this again?

00:34I don't know what I'm doing here.

00:35I was going up every week and he just fancy,

00:37he was like, you may as well just do this.

00:39It just went from there really.

00:40We were doing so much of the podcast stuff outside of work.

00:43We had to make a decision where it was like,

00:45either we stop doing that and we just keep our jobs

00:48or we'll leave our jobs and we try this instead.

00:51And we just thought, why not?

00:53We know our industry, we know what we're doing.

00:56We know how to make a podcast.

00:57We know how to do audio, but how do you run a business?

01:00And that's where Go Succeed really stepped in and helped us out with that.

01:04The help we received from Go Succeed began as mentorship.

01:07They talked us through everything between our financials,

01:12our business plan, insurance and things like that.

01:15Stuff we didn't know about.

01:17There's just so many things that you don't know.

01:19The next stage with Go Succeed was taking on the foundation program.

01:22Then went a bit more in depth about our future plans,

01:26how we can scale up the business, how we can make it a bit more profitable,

01:30how we can make it more sustainable.

01:32It was as part of that program that we realised that the grant was available.

01:36That's opened up a whole new sort of world for us in the last few months.

01:41We take a lot of pride in the achievements of our clients.

01:44One of our clients sell out a live podcast in the Ulster Hall.

01:49I remember us filming their podcast in the shed.

01:52To see a thousand people come out and for them to have that payoff was actually amazing for us to watch.

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