By Dana Sedgwick
Last week was a big one here in NYC for conference-goers, with two very different overlapping conferences that spanned Manhattan and Brooklyn: New Music Seminar & Northside Festival. While NMS was celebrating its thirteenth birthday, Northside’s NExT (the interactive portion that took place Thurs/Friday) is only in its third year… just a starting place in my attempt to place these two entities in context with each other.
I strolled down to NMS on Tuesday afternoon, entering the old New Yorker hotel on 8th Ave and 34th st with a sigh of relief having battled my way through the Penn Station street traffic and the smell of Nuts for Nuts. Sadly, the environment inside felt a tad stale as well… a bit dark, a bit dusty, the booths upstairs taking up a crowded entry way to large, carpeted open ballrooms where the panels were held.
Perhaps it’s unfair, but this did not ease my worry that the conference itself, with thirteen years under its belt (the majority which took place during a massive decline in recorded music revenue), was a little like your dad trying on skinny jeans. The same bloated arguments that we’ve heard over and over again, trying to tuck themselves into new cooler packages that boast designer tags like Spotify, Amazon and iTunes.
Not to say NMS 2013 didn’t make the jump into the emerging new music industry. In truth, it was taking every opportunity to celebrate it. The opening “State of the Industry” panel with Frank Cooper (CMO at PepsiCo), John Sykes (President, Entertainment Enterprises at Clear Channel), and Rio Caraeff (President & CEO, Vevo) explored the trends towards mobile and brand partnerships. Other panels boasted names like “Direct to Fan: Best Practices to maximize fan revenues,” “Youtube: Changing the Music Game,” & “The Digital Radio Explosion.”
And if you take a moment to read the opening statement from NMS Executive Director, Tommy Silverman, in the hefty NMS booklet, you’ll not find a apocalyptic tale of worry for a dying industry. Silverman, who helped with the launch of SoundScan, is notably optimistic, even enthused that the industry has “broken free of the prison of music sales as revenue drivers” and he champions streaming, subscription and advertising as the new revenue makers.
But still there’s this nagging feeling I have about NMS… like the name of the session I attended: “Reasons to be Cheerful: Part 3.” Well I missed part 1 & 2 I guess, but if there was a need for three conversations that are meant to make us more cheerful, there might be a problem in perspective here. When you gather together the music industry, just us, it’s as if the specter of the past 12 years hangs over every conversation, as if every sentence really begins with “Well, here’s the good news…”
This is what I found refreshing about Northside Festival. Sure, it’s a baby and sure, it does not come with the big booklet, the 13 years of wisdom and experience, and the big keynote speakers. It’s not even really about music. NExT (Northside Entrepreneurship + Technology) champions NYC’s entrepreneurs, who are “leading a nationwide shift in the way companies are built and grow.” Hosted in the brick-walled conference room at the Wythe Hotel and the wooden-planked tasting room of the Brooklyn Brewery, NExT clearly made an effort to bring together professionals across different industries to talk about the trends that are influencing them all alike.
I went to NExT on Friday, walking through the quiet and serine streets of Williamsburg at 10AM to catch “Building on the Shoulders of Giants” featuring PopTip, Growhack and IND Music (the latter of which is a friend of SoundCtrl’s, having just participated in our Music Tech Day at Internet Week NY). Though not focused on music, this conversation delighted me because it showcased how different industries can learn from each other in their efforts to make more meaningful connections – from fan to artist, from consumer to brand… these relationships are in many ways, very similar.
I also happened to stumble in early, catching the second half of “How SMBs are Creating Big Business for Startups.” Zephrin Lasker of Pontiflex surprised me with his response to the moderator’s query of whether we might be over-saturated when it comes to SMBs.
Lasker believes that our economy has fundamentally changed and that there are financial consequences to that switch:
“We are in a time where the robots aren’t quite taking over… but they are all of a sudden becoming very useful. Things that once needed a lot of human interaction/engagement now are done better with algorithms. And while we are nowhere near bursting the bubble (it was only 7 years ago that amount of people who primarily get their information from the internet hit above 50%), we do often see the analogue dollar becoming the digital dime. Sometimes, there is less money to be made in a more “efficient” market… but the losses do scale once the consumers/customers see the benefit of a new efficient system.”
In this case, he was specifically talking about a legacy company like yellow pages going digital, but couldn’t the same be said of the a legacy record label trying to navigate the overall switch to a digital music market?
In Silverman’s opening statement of the NMS handbook, he asserted that “Finally, technologies are coming of age. The machine is being lubricated to allow the passage of more miracles.” I do believe that the majority of the music industry now feels the same. We are an optimistic group, eager to engage in a more “efficient market…” but have been impatient in allowing that market to rescale. We still expect the digital dime to be the analogue dollar.
With digital sales having reached their peak, and the move from music acquisition to music access officially underway, we might not find that balance for a while yet. But conferences like NExT have it right… we should be in conversation across industry lines and cultivate disruption, entrepreneurship, and cross pollination.
NMS is still the powerhouse. Those who spoke in 2013 have seen where we’ve been and probably have the best knowledge of what we’re facing. But don’t underestimate the underdogs like Northside’s NExT… It managed to make me cheerful without reminding me I should be.
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