I’m slowly recovering from 5 days of music industry conference madness. Firstly, I traveled to Delaware for the boutique and super-friendly Dewey Beach Music Conference. Dewey Beach is a very artist-orientated music conference, showcasing up and coming talent to a variety of industry professionals. It also had some great panel discussions covering social networks, management and the live booking arena. After Dewey, I headed back to DC for the mother of all conferences, The Future of Music Policy Summit. The Future of Music Coalition is a national nonprofit organization “that works to ensure a diverse musical culture where artists flourish, are compensated fairly for their work, and where fans can find the music they want.” Basically, they are a lovely bunch of people in DC fighting for the rights of artists and music fans in a country where “big media” want to control the internet, consolidation is killing local radio, and recording artists don’t get performing royalties from commercial radio.
At both conferences I discovered a variety of new initiatives and educational tip-bits which I thought I should share. Here’s a quick summary:
- A new music sales widget has been recently launched called Loudfeed.com. A serious competitor to the popular thebizmo.com, Loud Feed allows artists and fans to sell music, concert tickets, merchandise and more via an easily embeddable widget. The main differences (that I have noticed to far) between the two models, is that LoudFeed.com operates on a set (low) monthly fee, with no commission rate on sales. It also allows artists to customize their widgets with artwork etc, and provides website options too. LoudFeed also uses Amazon for payment rather than Paypal.
- Another great digital start-up initiative I noticed was swapgigs.com. One of the biggest problems for artists in the US is how to start touring outside of their home market without taking financial risks. One of the solutions is presented by swapgigs.com, which allows bands to reach new markets with less risk, by literally swapping gigs with other bands in other areas and pooling their fan bases.
- This maybe old news but reverbnation.com rocks! I hadn’t realized until now how fantastically empowering reverbnation is for artists. It really is a one-stop shop for artists, fans, venues and record labels. If you need a newsletter mailing list manager, they do it (free for the first 500 emails), if you want to offer a free download to fans in exchange for an email address, they do it, if you need fananalytics, they do it….the list goes on….If you are an artist and you’re not using reverbnation yet, then you MUST!
- Another new music industry widget has just launched but this time it’s for live bookings. livemusicmachine.com is an innovative new live booking widget which has been developed expressly to make it easier for artists and bands to be booked by anyone at anytime and from anywhere on the Internet. Please check it out for yourselves.
- Apart from the Future of Music Coalition, here are a few other non-profit organizations I believe are fighting a very noble cause in the US:
Free Press – “Free Press is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to reform the media. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, quality journalism, and universal access to communications.”
The Music FIRST coalition – “The musicFIRST coalition is a partnership of artists and organizations in the music community who support compensating performers for their work when it’s played over the air. Corporate Radio has had a free pass for too long. It’s time to level the playing field and promote fairness among all types of radio”.
More conference reportage to follow soon…