Recap: Future Of Music Summit 2009 October 08, 2009
- Digital and Mobile
By Glenn Peoples, Nashville
This year's Future of Music Summit, held from Sunday to Tuesday in Washington, D.C., had its usual mix of intelligence and meaningful discourse.
The appearance of Senator Al Franken, who once drew a map of the lower 48 in under two minutes on Letterman, seemed to have piqued reporters' interest in the annual event and received the most media coverage. But other speakers and topics received coverage as well, and here are some places you can go to read and hear what was said.
If you missed the conference, you may have caught its webcast from the Future of Music Web site. Even busy people who only occasionally tuned into the webcast were treated to great commentary from political and business leaders.
The webcast's archives are still streaming, by the way, and anybody interested in wonky discussions on policy, business models and strategy should tune in. For a one-hour segment featuring FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, Senator Franken and R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, watch this 54-minute segment that originally aired on C-SPAN on Monday. Franken's speech has both levity and seriousness (when talking about net neutrality).
"Copying can't be stopped," said artist manager Peter Jenner. "I have an interest in getting paid, but we have to stop thinking of the Internet like a shop and more like a radio station." The industry is clinging to a business built on mass-produced "small bits of plastic" sold inside physical stores. "The less we think about how we did it in the past, the faster we'll figure out how to make money," he said.
Blog coverage seemed a bit light, although Twitter posts with the #FMC09 hash tag could account for content that would have been blogged in previous years. The most thorough coverage of the summit was at the FMC Policy Summit Live Blog. The I Like Yellow Things' summaries of day one and day two. Magnificat Baroque's blog has a good recap of day one.
For what was said during the conference, Hypebot has quotes overhead from day two and day three. One comment heard in the original webcast that seems to have been overlooked (not just by Hypebot but by everybody) was made by Spotify's Daniel Ek. "We want to give the data back to the artists," he said during an interview. He wasn't clear exactly what data would be given to artists, but the value of user info at a service like Spotify would be enormous. That's really big news.
The Washington City Paper has a recap of the music journalism panel. There was at least one odd comment on this panel: the argument that nobody buys anything anymore, so music critics shape tastes rather than help guide purchases. As is often the case, speaking in absolutes tends to ruin what could have been a good point. Anybody who has ever looked at sales data, or even the eMusic album chart, after Pitchfork gives a glowing review to an indie rock album knows this theory is completely wrong. Music journalism, in whatever shape or form it takes these days, can still move units. Period.
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