JOBS: Music business leads with "New Deal" to buck downturn.

New Deal Of The Mind project aims to create jobs and opportunities in the creative sector

The music business is at the centre of an ambitious new project to create jobs and opportunities in the creative sector, as the recession continues to bite.

The New Deal Of The Mind (NDOTM) is intended to attract the sharpest and most creative minds to the arts at a time of growing redundancies and cut backs. It has buy-in across all sectors of the creative industries, as well from as the main political parties in Westminster.

Going beyond the internships and apprentice schemes that already exist in the music business, the NDOTM aims to work with Government to reallocate money already being spent on areas like benefits in ways that mutually benefit the workforce, the creative sector and the economy. It also extends to schemes to open up vacant buildings that can be used as arts/creative spaces.

"NDOTM takes its name from President Roosevelt's New Deal in the Thirties and the notion that the New Deal doesn't just have to be about building new houses or new roads," says Columbia Records UK managing director Mike Smith, who sits within the NDOTM coalition.

"You can have a way to encourage artists and the creative people around them and find roles for them."

While NDOTM brings about new thinking and ideas, it also requires commercial expertise to be implemented successfully. This comes via Creative Business Limited (CBL), a venture between Rich Futures and Music Technology Ltd, which is the legal/deal-making agency for NDOTM. CBL is already actively scoping out and signing deals with various music companies and blue-chip brands.