Northside Festival Recap – Day 1

by Francis Bea

With the fourth year of Brooklyn’s Northside Festival kicking off, it was the festival’s first time hosting an entrepreneurship festival in conjunction with its art, music and film festival this year. Thanks to The Knitting Factory’s Valerie Gurka, and in partnership with AT&T, the Northside Festival hosted its first music and tech summit, titled, “Music Now Summit.”

New Technologies in Booking and Touring

The panel kicked off with Valerie Gurka moderating a panel comprised of Troy Hansbrough of Sonicbids, Laura Wilson of World Cafe Live, Howard Han of ReverbNation, and Chris Diaz, also of the Knitting Factory discussing the latest trends among venues looking to fill up open gigs. Wilson and Diaz both began the panel by offering some insight into just what makes a band attractive to a venue. For those of you looking to book your next show at the Knitting Factory, or any local venue for that matter, the following words of advice should be invaluable.

The Knitting Factory prefers a four band bill comprised of three local artists and one touring artist, as it seeks to keep to its roots of promoting local artists. In fact, Diaz suggested that bands should not bring forward a bill of three touring artists and one local artist.

World Café Live and The Knitting Factory revealed that they both look for bands that can bring in an audience of at least 25 to 30 people. If those figures are still a reach, bands should look at playing in local shows where they can prove to target venues that they can draw a sufficiently sized crowd. However, most venues will always halve the number of people a band will claim to expect to draw, but it’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver.

If you’re out there pitching your band’s music to venues, make sure to simplify the process for the venue to access the music. On one recent occasion, Wilson revealed in an example, a band she was considering offering a spot to, asked her to check out their Facebook page. Unfortunately, the music on the page could not be accessed without ‘liking’ the band’s Facebook page. Not surprisingly, that immediately turned her off and the band never got the slot.

It was evident from the panel discussion that due to the innumerable requests and submissions these venues received on a daily basis, simplicity and ease of access was crucial in getting a venue’s attention. This notion translated into Sonicbids’ own submission process. Hansbrough underlined the importance of keeping EPKs and bios fresh, particularly due to the fact that a team at Sonicbids will look at 100% of festival submissions submitted on the Sonic Bids platform. However the submission process, whether through a venue or tech platform, does not end at the pressing “send” or “submit.” Bands should always exhibit some aggression by following up with their submissions, short of harassment, of course.

Ideally, as Han suggested, building relationships with key players in the industry who are responsible for managing festival submissions is the most effective strategy for getting your band into a coveted festival. But what this would take is the diligence, seeing as how for example, The Knitting Factory has already booked half of its shows during CMJ, despite the fact that the festival takes place four months from now.

The Next Generation of Social Media to Market Your Band or Venue

The second panel included Jason Boner of The Dharma Body, Eric Swenson of Indaba Music, Kevin King of MusicHype, Atlantic Records, and SoundCtrl’s very own Alex Kirshbaum, was moderated by Corey Maass of Gelform, who lead a discussion that revolved heavily around on the panelist’s sentiments on the uses of existing social media platforms among bands. Taking the stage as the focal point of the discussion were the regular social media platforms including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. However the panelists did delve into Instagram, and included a few surprising contenders in the social media space.

It’s not often you get to listen to a band member headline a panel of industry leaders, and Jason Boner was able to bring a fresh perspective on existing and emerging social media platforms. He started off by discussing Instagram as an emerging crucial tool in a band’s social media arsenal, as it breaks down the barrier between fans and bands. After all images are oftentimes more engaging than text. Hackney of Atlantic records accompanied Boner’s observation with an example of Jason Mraz’s Instagram contest, which plucked 15 of Mraz’s favorite Instagram images in a contest and featured the winning images in an exclusive gallery.

The discussion then transitioned into the panel’s sentiments on BitTorrent and Grooveshark. One great example brought up by Kevin King of an artist taking advantage of BitTorrent was Pretty Lights. The band worked with BitTorrent to release a six track EP, which resulted in capturing 60,000 more fans and increased the band’s website’s views by 60 percent.

Kirshbaum reminded the panelists however that social media isn’t a be-all end-all. It’s merely a tool that is necessary for monetizing the music business.

Atlantic Records brought up a great example of social media’s effectiveness. A video of a marriage proposal playing to Bruno Mars’ “Marry You” went viral thanks to an employee at Atlantic who was friends with the fiancée, Isaac Lamb. The employee shared the video with co-workers who then sent Bruno Mars’ team, who sent it to Bruno Mars’ manager, and eventually ended up with Bruno Mars himself tweeting about the proposal. Best of all, it actually increased the sales of Mars’ song.

The panel ended off with some must-haves for any artist. Kirshbaum noted that every artist must have a central website. Swenson offered three suggestions: Know how to brand yourself; find the social networks that best represent yourself; and finally, know how to use the social media platforms properly. For Atlantic, YouTube has been the most effective platform and couldn’t stress its efficacy enough.

The New Era of Music Licensing for TV, Film, Interactive Gaming and more

The discussion on music licensing was moderated by SonicScoop’s David Weiss, with panelists including Brandon Mason of Juxtaposed Music, Erik Masone of Deep Freeze Music, and Kevin Wilson of ESPN.

Music supervisors are inundated with music and need a way of cutting through the noise with curation tools. Mason of Juxtaposed Music uses tools like Bandcamp for discovering new musicians, but when it comes to licensing an artist’s music, there are innumerable factors to consider. Multiple rights holders often exist for a single track and music supervisors will be required to find the rights holders, while negotiating the costs for licensing the music. For musicians, the simplest way to get their music on the air is to go through a licensing agency, which is typically a one-stop solution that brands will turn to.

Non-exclusive rights are not failsafe, and musicians should avoid selling their music to “re-titling libraries.” Big corporations today are shying away from purchasing non-exclusive rights.

Before getting into a deal with a licensing agency, it is important to understand the agency’s blanket licensing fees. If a licensing agency strikes a blanket deal for a brand, thereby allowing the brand to get complete access to the agency’s music library, any artist’s music chosen from the library may be used without having the revenue from the deal split with the artists.

Future Platforms in Music

The final panel of the day involved Seth Hillinger of New York Music Tech Meetup moderating the panel comprised of Elliot Van Burskik of Evolver.fm and The Echo Nest, Jason Herskowitz of Official.fm, and Jesse Israel of Cantora Labs.

The panel began with a discussion about how far music technology had come in the last 30 years, and reminisced about what milestones had been achieved to get to where we are today. The talk immediately started with Apple and its early Macintosh operating system.

Van Burskik, discussing Apple with the RIAA ten years ago, learned that Steve Jobs was interested in creating a platform for selling music via the Macintosh OS. In fact, had Apple’s early Macintosh OS been a success, we may not have had iTunes in the way that we know it today.

Fast forward to 2012, and Herskowitz revealed that iTunes was a $2.5 billion business that wasn’t profitable and running at a loss.

Spotify’s Facebook integration, according to the panelists, was a saving grace for Spotify’s business, but the integration hasn’t been particularly useful for its users. In one example Jesse Israel revealed that with his Spotify plays being published onto Facebook, his friends were more inclined to make jabs at his guilty-pleasure listening habits including “Call Me Maybe.” With little benefits, Israel announced that he decided to discontinue sharing his playlist on Facebook. He also expressed his disdain for Spotify’s mobile platforms, as it lacks in its social features, and plans on canceling his subscription. Instead, he’s opting for Rdio.

There was the idea of a mood-based app thrown around that the panel toyed with as a potential future of music technology. The music would change tracks to suit the mood of the listener or his or her action. For example, if the weather takes a turn for the worse and unleashes a storm, the music may be changed to accompany the ambience by playing somber music. If a listener is relaxed, the music will automatically account for the listener’s mood and appropriately change the track to a soothing song.