Camping Versus Urban

I have two panel write ups for you today, as many as there is alas a lot are concurrent so I am trying to cherry pick the most valid ones to find information on. The two I chose today are relevant because they lie in the two biggest growing areas of music outside the web; music licensing and festivals. Jeff and Todd Brebec have been involved in music publishing for over twenty years and where hear to partly sell their book and partly to impart knowledge on the not so dark art of music publishing. The bigger issue with publishing is trying to get into new markets and being aware of your product and its limitations. A Lot of what goes on at SXSW is based on you being pro quality, this is no exception but the best piece of advice I can give anyone is be prepared and ready for your market, because if your not then things won't happen for you. The best phrase I heard for it today was Export Ready. Anywho back to the licensing. There are 56 different licenses available in the US. Different markets have different rules but effectively that's a guide on how to make money. Some of the biggest talk points aside from the usual MCPRS/PPL style licenses is currently based in games, the advice given was play a few games and buy a few magazines to find out if you have music that would fit into a relevant game. With the number of games available now lots of different soundtracks are required and you maybe able to find something to fit into your chosen sound-scape. There is of course the more traditional method of making money from music, ie mechanical rates from CD's however that market is dropping away as downloads take over. Certain artists are doing well, Taylor Swift is the current example, but the majority of music buyers are now downloading legally rather than any other method. However the new methods stretch into all areas of media. From greeting cards to toys licensing really is where the long term money is at.

Last year I attended a panel called International Festivals and this year was a follow up with pretty much the same panel. The festivals represented included Glastonbury, Bonaroo, Pedrosa Stump and WOMAX. The general gist of this panel was to give people an idea of what was necessary to put a festival together and to get onto festival bills. There are basically two kinds of festival, for the sake of argument because no one has really defined them anywhere I'm going to call them Urban Multi Stage and Rural Main Stage. I realise that's a great over generalisation, but you get the general picture, within that frame work you have industry and retail festivals. SXSW is a Urban Multi Stage Industry festival, Glastonbury a Rural Main Stage Retail festival. When your trying to build a festival its important to know where you want to go with it and one of the things talked about most was aiming at a market. Keeping your approach broad has its advantages, keeping it narrow has its advantages too. Small festivals may do better working on the narrow model, but it doesn't have to be genre based. Festivals in Holland that concentrate on new European only bands do very well, as does Pedrosa Stomp who concentrate purely on long forgotten artists. The bigger festivals survive by being broad with many smaller stages to give everyone something to enjoy. My own take on this is festivals this summer will have to work really hard to keep customers. Prices keep increasing but no one seems to be improving the product that much. Leeds last year was great musically one of the best I have seen in many years however the parking was still a night mare, the stewarding was understaffed as always. Things like this annoy people, being used to it, it doesn't bother me that much, as I go every year and will put up with a certain amount to be with my friends. However in the long run will younger people put up with it? The other worry for the bigger festivals is the lack of sponsorship, Carling pulled out of Leeds last year. Some of the smaller festivals struggle with the lack of demographic development in the niche festivals. However the general feeling of how to get around this was to concentrate on building up relationships with the City or host area and see how much money can be put into the local economy. WOMAX uses this model when it comes to finding a host city. The raise in business revenue while impress most City Councils but certainly the bigger Rural Main Stage Retail festivals will have to find new ways evolve.

That's all for now more pictures in the next post.