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I now had a few days to digest the Transmission conference that happened last week in Vancouver.

It was quite intense (and that’s a good thing) and very educational. This is something you cannot say very often for music industry events, most of the time we are discussing the same issues over and over again and when you attend these events on a regular basis there are not many new idea coming out of them.

Transmission was different, probably for two reasons: a) many of the people attending were experienced professional who would have interesting ideas and b) it was a busy two day event with various presentations, round tables and meals. Essential we were kept busy for the entire time which I enjoyed.

Thursday started with an introduction of our ‘general facilitator’ Paul Hoffert who was introducing us to the ‘bagel effect’ which deals with a 50 years cycle between “freedom and security” which explains the disintermediation in the music industry. It was an interesting start and dropped us right into the deep end.

He was followed by a presentation by Dennis Adamo who is trying to resurrect allofmp3.com. After claiming the music industry is losing $5bn per year through unlicensed music downloads and the best way of “converting pirates into customers” is to drop the price, he lost my attention. Surly p2p file-sharing is more then just about the cost for the consumer and music services will have to attach additional value to recorded music if they want people to pay for it.

Mark Holden was speaking after him about his company Hip Digital and the download store they built for Aeroplan and Nectar Card. There seems to be an opportunity for the industry to generate revenues through people redeeming their reward point for music. Seems to make sense but surly this is a niche market, right?

This was when most peoples favourite part started which were the round tables. Up to 10 people from different industries would discuss topics for about an hour and the outcome would be reported back and at the end of the conference we would have a look at the overall results of our conversations. I met plenty of people who I hadn’t met before and I would normally not meet since they might work in different ports of the music industry.

After lunch we saw presentations from Jackie Suebeck (from Footprint Worldwide) who talked about China followed by Mathew Daniel from R2G who is based in Beijing. I liked this thought: “If your music is being pirated in China then you’ve already done some things right”. He was referring to the fact that if music is already popular to some degree you can then try and monetize that.

The final presentation in the afternoon came from Simon Wheeler who gave us an overall overview on how the Beggars Group is facing the current challenges in the industry. He was saying that they are cautiously trying new models to see what is working out: “You have to be in the market to learn”.

The next day you could clearly see the effects of the showcase the night before (or the drinks that has been consumed during this) with Paul Hoffert certainly making less sense than the day before.

We started with a presentation David Neale from Telus giving us a great sales pitch on how Blackberry and Telus offer great opportunities for the music industry, I don’t think I was the target audience for this.

Kelly Cha talked about her experience of being a radio and TV presenter as well as musician in China followed by a great presentation from Scott Chohen of The Orchard about a two tier approach of monetizing music: only 5% of the market actually purchases recorded music and they can be monetized through existing models (download shops, subscription services, etc) but the 95% of consumers that do not pay for music directly have to be charged at the “point of connection”. This would mean some sort of fee that the user will pay to the ISP which will then get paid out to the music owners. Certainly not a new idea (and he has been talking about that for a long time) but he presented it well and from a slightly different angle. My favourite quote: “you have to monetize the customer not the content”.

After Paul almost forgot about him, Charles Caldas from Merlin then went on stage to talk about the indie community and their struggle ‘against’ the majors.

After another round table session we then saw an interview with Seymour Stein which was a great finish to the event. It was really just a story telling hour where heard tales such as how he signed Madonna. About the internet he said: “it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, it’s here”.

Final thoughts? Great event. Two days of meeting lots of people and having stimulating conversation, just what the industry meets. Unfortunately many of the presentation were a bit weak and our facilitator could have been a bit more prepared to guide us to the busy schedule.

Tags: conferences, transmission, vancouver

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 2:31 pm and is filed under On the road, Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.