There was an interesting article in Gigaom last week about a trend towards the “boring” at the MusicTech Summit in San Francisco, an event which features some of the newest and coolest companies in the music/digital world with sessions like Music Hack Day and Music StartUp Academy. The point was that conversation leaned much more towards numbers discussions, ecommerce, and B2B solutions rather than “cooler” topics like new DJs, festivals, and Spotify playlists.
While to outsiders, this sort of talk sounds much less exciting, it indicates an exciting move forward for the music industry. People are talking about business, about making money, about connecting with fans directly. As we’ve been saying for years, the industry is in no way dead – though the internet and digital age brought some major growing pains. The MusicTech Summit highlighted some of the positives that have come out of these changes with platforms like Official.FM, which allows artists to manage and track their music online, and ThrillCall, the GroupOn for live music.
It’s exciting to see the new industry emerging and watch how companies that only came into existence within the past 4-5 years like TopSpin and MobileRoadie seem like old pros because they got it early. They understood what the fans wanted and what the artists needed to keep those fans engaged and spending money on their content and products. The rest of the music industry is catching up and there are more and more fantastic platforms and businesses popping up to benefit both the artist (and the teams behind them) and the fan.
