The San Francisco MusicTech Summit is the place to go if you want to find out things like how to make sense of the murky licensing laws surrounding music distribution in our digital age, how to engage the community of fans around a band or artist and where to find the best open source audio technologies to support your newly developed app.
In the Hotel Kabuki yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people, most of them in their 20s to 30s wearing tight jeans and/or bangs and hailing from companies with snappy, two-word-mashup names such as TuneCore, BandCamp and VentureBeat sat in on panel discussions where they asked questions like, “What are best practices for crowdsourcing the ideation of the Xhiph app?”
There was relatively little on the program to do with the art of making music using the latest technological advances, though there were demos of music software and sets performed by DJs and electronic musicians (e.g. the guy pictured above was making pleasant synthesizer sounds on his instrument in the lounge area for a while.)
Most of the attendees seemed preoccupied with questions of how to make more money from listeners. Judging by the discussions I heard, the act of creating and fostering community around an artist or band using social media ultimately seemed geared towards finding out how to monetize those relationships, e.g. through incentivizing the fans who drive other fans to buy tickets to a band’s concerts.
There’s nothing wrong with making money. That’s what a business is meant to do. But I think I would have liked to have seen panelists and attendees make a stronger connection between the commercial interests of this burgeoning field and the artistic ones.