heute:pop:blog.  

When I realized that I won’t be able to attend this years Transmission conference because of other commitments (it will become more clear next week) I was disappointed. I had such a great time last year and I felt I’m missing out.

Fortunately I was able to participate at least in one way: I took part in their Politalk48 session which is basically a panel of experts who discuss a topic via email over a period of 48 hours. The results are then published on the TransmitNow website for anyone to read. The topic was “Next Generation Leadership” and the outcome can be found here.

If you have seen me recently on a panel or doing a presentation you would have noticed that there is one topic that I’m very interested in: how the consumption of recorded music has changed over the years and how it will continue to develop.

Looking into the past is vital but also fairly easy. The future is the tricky one and for some the most fascinating: I want to find out how we will consume recorded music in 10 years from now but to find some good answers I might need some help.

This is how I came up with my idea for a panel at SXSW next year in Austin. As you might know, they encourage people to come up with ideas for a panel or presentation and post them on their website for anyone to vote on.

Of course you guessed it by now: please vote for my panel suggestion at the SXSW 2010 Panelpicker. You can see from my description on there what I’m trying to do. Also, please suggest people that should be on that panel by posting a comment here or on the Panelpicker. Maybe I won’t be the only one that’s trying to promote themselves.

Arttu was so kind to upload my short interview for the Finnish 6pm news to YouTube so I can embed it here as well:

Helsinki reminded me of Hamburg. Maybe is was the lake in the centre or the lack of an Old Town (which was like in Hamburg destroyed in WW2). But most significantly I had a brilliant time in Helsinki, just like whenever I visit my home town.

I was there for an event organized by the YLE (“the Finnish BBC”) called “Embracing the music – music, Internet and public service” last Friday and it was well organized, informative and a lot of fun. Often these kinds of events are exactly the opposite.

As well as taking part in a big panel discussion I did a presentation (hopefully) giving an overview of the development of digital recorded music over the recent years and where it might be heading in the future. It had the catchy title “Development of digital recorded music and the way we consume it – the past, present and future”. I even had slides (which I never do).

My talk was built on the following assumption:

Music is like a rumour:

• It will spread around and one cannot control it
• It has a creator but no owner
• It has a ‘value’ but it can’t be set by the creator

“Control” is the key term here – we lost it when we started digitizing our recorded music and started to conntect our computers to a network. Control over recorded music is something we will never get back and any effort on this is wasted energy.

I always want to blog while I’m going to conferences but more realistically I will give my report on Midem next week when I’m back in London. Things just get too hectic for me to be able to sit down for a moment and write a few words. I am told there are less people going this year but my schedule is now full. I know already I’m going to regret having booked too many meeting.

I will leave you with with a video from one of my favourite bands of the moment, Frightened Rabbit (found this via nomnomnom). Awesome stuff.

Frightened Rabbit “I Feel Better” from Sam Molleur on Vimeo.

As you might know I attend a lot of conferences. After years of doing this the excitement wears off and it often becomes just part of the job. Fortunately, I really enjoy travelling so even when the conference does not turn out to be a success you’re still in a different environment which is something you will always gain something from. If you’re not then you’re not travelling the right way.

For this one I am excited though: I just confirmed my ticket for the Transmission conference which takes place in Vancouver this year in the first week of December. This has been highly recommended to me by Sean Adams who was saying this is one of the best industry conference he’s ever been to. And he is going to a lot of those.

The Transmission guys are approaching this gathering of people from the music and technology sectors differently and I think I’m going to enjoy this as

• it’s limited to 200 people (I feel a intimate setup makes it easier to connect to people)
• there seems to be a tight schedule of interesting talks and round tables (being German a good organization is something I always appreciate
• it sounds like we will have people talking from outside our industries (I get bored by hearing the same people talking about the same topics so this could be very refreshing)
• I expect the topics to be very high level and therefore educating (again, you often hear the same things at panel around the world, I want to hear people explaining, educating and inspiring me)

As you can see I built up high expectations, I hope they will be met. And if not there is always Vancouver, not the worst place in the world to spend a few days in anyway.

Is anyone else going? Or have you been?

I had a few days now to recover from Popkomm (and more importantly the weekend that followed the conference). I’ve been asked a lot “so how was Popkomm?” and probably never gave the same answer twice. In summary this is probably what I was trying to say:

It was yet again less busy than the years before. If you’ve followed my tweets you would have seen that I kept complaining about it. After thinking about it a bit more the fact that there were less people attending probably wasn’t a bad thing: it is totally fine that those events become smaller and in a way they might even improve if they are more intimate. Nevertheless it was very unusual to be at the British stand (which was put on by AIM only this year and not the BPI any more) on Thursday afternoon at 4.30pm and seeing only 40 people standing there. At that time you would normally have about 300 people there drinking their (hopefully) well deserved beer.

As I posted here before many of my UK and US contacts didn’t even make it to Popkomm this year. One common explanation for that was: Midem is happening in three months so one might as well go there only and meet everyone. When you have to travel over from the States this makes a lot of sense.

It was only when I went to the Soundcloud launch party at Picknick last Friday night that someone pointed out to me that there were hardly any labels at Popkomm. I realized that I only had a few conversations about music at the conference – it was mainly about the business around it. Again, this is not a bad thing but it makes me feel less party of a creative industry. When I unpacked my bag on Sunday I had two CDs in my hand – when I first went to Popkomm in 2003 (this was still in Cologne) I came back with bags full of CDs and records. Were those the better days? I’m not into nostalgia so I’m going to say no: those times were just different.

There are some great gigs happening at the time of Popkomm but when you look at the events that are happening at the Kulturbrauerei you start thinking that some of those seem a bit ‘forced’. In regards to the line up of many of those gigs you can imagine that the promoters are sitting there thinking they have to fill all those venues because it is Popkomm time and therefore some gigs are a bit random. In addition to the official Popkomm events there are of course other great parties happening all over the city but I suppose that’s Berlin…

So how was Popkomm? I enjoyed it. The conference will have to find their place in the market as they are competing with other events more than ever but if they are clever they will be able to stay relevant in the future. They maybe weren’t this year.