SF Music Tech
May 15th, 2008Last week Slater and I (+aza spoke) attended SF MusicTech.
The goal being to see what is going on in the modern music industry, particularly in tech. It definitely helped me realize that the music industry is not dead — just the “selling round plastic at a store” part is.
There were a couple re-occurring themes that I picked up on.
1) Artists seem to be gaining more control as everything moves on to this internet. That is, the internet is slowly cutting out the labels and artists are able to self promote.
2) There are various efforts to help bands “do good” while they have an audience. For example, one of pkim’s old friends, Erin Potts, runs a company called Air Traffic Control. They are pretty much dedicated to the idea of an artists ability to cause social change. I think this aligns pretty well with our ideas around “doing good AND promoting Firefox”.
3) The term “band-analytics” came up a few times. That is, the internet is helping bands understand their fan base — in ways never possible with-out it.
It was a very interesting conference, with many cool people. Slater had a nice conversation with folks from Pandora, and I got to meet Elise from Indie Pop Rocks! We are continuing to work on potential campaigns that promote artists along with Firefox. Hopefully we will have more to share more in the next couple weeks.
