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MIDEM 2016 highlights

MIDEM (The International Music Market) celebrated its 50th anniversary
from the 3rd – 6th June 2016.

The first edition was held in Lyon in 1963, the year the Beatles played the Cavern Club in Liverpool for the 300th and final time and issued their first LP (Please Please Me).

Wow! Do you remember?

The next 49 ‘Music Markets’ have all played out on the Croisette in Cannes.

MIDEM 2016 boasted

5500 visitors from 75 countries, 1100 exhibitors, 35 national pavilions, 145 reporters

and

3 nights live with 34 concerts
The Music Ecosystem … networking ops, business analysis, the MIDEM Awards…
MIDEM Lab …the most promising start-ups proposing innovative solutions…
The Future of Music …keynote sessions fired by industry heavyweights
Artist Accelerator taking budding talent to the global stage
MIDEM Hack Day. Developers with 48hours to build a new piece of music hardware or software - building not talking; fun not business

The hottest topic was livestreaming.

“In Japan, YouTube is radio,” said Pete Downton, Deputy CEO of 7digital;

Pandora’s Jeff Zuchowski said “80% of artists played on Pandora have never been on terrestrial radio… some get 3-4 million listeners a month”

Pitchfork’s Chris Kaskie flew the flag for curated playlists: “As a listener, having 800 million songs is the last thing you want”.

Industry consultant Mark Mulligan outlined Midia Research’s findings “Curated playlists have accelerated just in the last three months: Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits had 2.3m followers and 35.4m monthly streams end-2014, but 7.8m followers and 120.4m streams by April 2016. It’s radio plus retail,” he said.

Pandora CEO Tim Westergren explained “We won’t follow the standard streaming template of ‘30m songs, a search box and good f**king luck!’”

Consultant Karen Allen explained that the new trend is about more than simply streaming live video online: it’s about interactivity with the audience “People do pay for content. It’s not great content, it’s fun content. It’s engaging”.

Greenberg Traurig lawyer Joel Katz had a word of caution: “Unfortunately, no streaming company has ever made a dime yet – little chance based on the percentage they pay the record companies”

But, “By the end of the summer we’ll see a settlement” predicted Glassnote Entertainment’s Daniel Glass.

“Thanks to their strike force, Apple will change market?dynamics”, Guillaume Leblanc, CEO Snep

Big Data

“We need big insight to go with it”. The wise man was Sony Music’s Daniel Hall!

Virtual Reality

An exclusive White Paper from MediaTainment Finance predicts VR will create $30 billion in annual revenues for the music industry by 2020, immersing consumers into music videos and making the viewer a part of what is happening. “VR music could end up doing for digital entertainment what videos on MTV did for music sales in the 1980s”, said the report.

Copyrights and emerging markets…

Warner Music Group’s Stu Zabala “We at Warner believe in emerging markets… we think that not believing in them is like not believing in the future of the world”

Alibaba Music’s Gao Xiaosong chaired a keynote: “Our government (China) decided to sacrifice content industries to help the internet industry, because ‘internet is the future’,” he said. “The top companies all grabbed music, movies, TV shows, news, photos. The government said ‘Okay, be patient, let them get big’.

They’re monsters now. So the government made the decision last year: ‘Now, you have to pay for copyrights’. And from last November, we don’t have piracy anymore.” Simple isn’t it!!

Blockchain and emerging markets

A new technology developed to exploit a decentralized, distributed (no owner, all users have access) database, which is safe from failure or corruption. Every change is recorded. It’s possible to amend the information, but impossible to delete the history. If approved by the owners, changes are recorded and attributed to the person who made the change.

The first successful application of the Blockchain technology has been to the Bitcoin operation.

Benji Rogers, chief strategy officer of Pledge Music believes it is the potential answer to the vexed problem of transparent copyright management. “We make it very difficult for users of our copyrights to know exactly how to pay the correct people”.

Results from a 5-day Blockchain laboratory at Music Tech Fest Berlin arrived in Cannes, where they were disseminated at the MIDEM Blockchain sessions.

You can learn a lot more at http://blog.midem.com/2016/04/blockchain-broken-music-industry/

Blockchain will be a major topic at MIDEM 2017

And so the event continued; The world is changing fast and companies are fighting to get in front.

MIDEM 2016 highlights