Midem 2011, How Music is Changing: Long live the Hackers!
I’ve attended @Midem for the last 12 years and there’s one thing that’s still the “same”, Cannes has super vibes around entertainment and music and spending 2–3 days there is always cool. The sun helps and I love running on the Croisette early in the morning.
This year’s vibes were especially amazing. I’ll try to explain.
I attended very few panels; they tended to be boring rehashes of things we already know. Instead I spent most of my time talking to people, matchmaking, mentoring, attending special events and meeting with my team. And you know what? The best part of Midem is now Midemnet. No contest.
Obviously I was really happy to have been invited to participate in the session called “How to License Your Music Business Worldwide.” That was particularly cool for me because it gave me the chance to share my experience and knowledge with all kinds of people who were eager for some guidance on how to take their local music service from local to global.
But the coolest part of the entire Midem, hands down, was the MusicHackDay. Let me set the scene. Imagine a crowded room filled with not only hackers but people from the music labels (major and indies), publishers, artists, journalists and industry analysts. There was electricity in the air as the hacks were presented and long time industry insiders were clearly blown away by the creative mashups that the developers were able to produce in just 24 hours.
Companies such as Soundcloud, Last.fm, The Echonest, Bmat, Extension.fm, 7 Digital, SongKick, Musescore and musiXmatch participated in the all-nighter and delivered an amazing showcase of apps. You can see them here.
After all was said and done, I hadn’t heard or seen anything new and exciting from the main Midem show, but it was clear to me and others that the new promise for the music industry is being delivered by the developer community. The next wave of growth in the digital music economy is going to be hacker-powered!
You don’t believe me? Just ask Martyn Davies, a hacker’s hacker, why he was hired by Universal Music. Yes. Universal Music.
The industry is finally getting that being OPEN means being OPEN MINDED, OPEN to experimentation and being OPEN to hackers and developers mashing up the services. Open is not just a slogan, it’s the essential ingredient to being successful in a rapidly changing landscape.
On the other side, developers and hackers, who in the past may have ignored copyright issues, are clearly understanding the value of working with licensed content to power their apps and services.
Artists and writers deserve to get paid for their awesomeness.
Hackers deserve to share revenue if they can increase distribution and track usage through their API’s.
Therefore, this is my dream and the winning equation:
Rightsholders + Hackers + API’s = Healthy Digital Music Industry.
Long live the music! Long live the hackers!
CEO & Founder musiXmatch
(image courtesy of flickr/Mayhem aka Robert Kaye from musicbrainz)
More Coverage about hacks here too :
