Conferences
Thoughts from the Future of Music conference
I had the pleasure of attending the Future of Music Policy Summit last week -- the conference with its new location in Montreal was a blast! As usual the conference team managed to put on an awesome conference with an impressive list of panels stacked with interesting people mostly from US and Canadian music industry.
The conference moved from Washington D.C. (crappy place for music) to McGill University in Montreal and was also aligned with the Pop Montreal concert series. McGill is situated close to a number of great restaurants and a number of concert venues, which allowed conference attendees to smoothly move from the conference to dinner and then to the concerts. It was awesome!
McGill also has an extensive music school that allowed cool new conference sessions. For instance, conference attendees got to witness Bob Ezrin record a string section in front of a live audience. He explained the process and carried it out on the stage in front of an audience that actually managed to stay quiet during the recording. I'm a geek and don't have much of a music background, so seeing someone as prominent and talented as Bob Ezrin do his work was truly enlightening.
The overall tone of the conference was positive -- many of the people from various portions of the music industry were quite up-beat about the state of the music industry. I also really appreciated the more international flavor of the conference -- some panels featured folks from the Canadian industry/government and the US industry/government. These panels provided some insight on how the laws and licensing issues in these two countries differ.
I was, however, quite disappointed that people still see value in DRM. Slimy statements like "DRM enables new possibilities for artists" were still prevalent -- the attitude towards DRM north of the border is no better than down here in the US. The one thing that I fully realized is that the artist always looses when it comes to DRM. Micheal Geist said something clever that cinched this: "The Sony rootkit debacle was not an enabler for artists". Once again the artist is stuck between the demands of the label and the wishes of music fans. Music fans don't like buying DRM'ed music and consequently less music is sold and the artist gets a small slice of an ever shrinking pie.
I was encouraged of more talk about labels acting like venture capitalists to fund new albums. For a long time I've been encouraging people to consider bands to be like start-up companies and having more people use start-up terminology starts to frame the discussion of starting a band in a much more intelligent light. With this discussion comes the question wether to take VC money (read: take a major label recording contract) or to bootstrap the band with personal resources. A major label recording contract was once considered the true mark of having made it to the big times, many people are now questioning this conventional wisdom. About time!
A couple of notable quotes:
Peter Jenner: "This music industry is no longer about mass markets. Its now about mass niche markets!"
Cathering Saxberg: (talking about declining music sales) "We do not have a demand problem -- people continue to be moved by music."
Sandy Pearlman: "Some artists from the 60's have become permanent contemporaries."
Once again, a big thumbs up to all the Future of Music and Pop Montreal folks. Well done!
Technorati Tags: conferences, future of music
Posted by Mayhem at October 9, 2006 04:03 PM
