Off To MusicMatters

Tomorrow I’ll be flying down to Singapore to attend this year’s MusicMatters conference. It will be two days of seminars, meetings, networking and, yes, a little music as well. In fact, there is a great showcase with forty live acts taking the stage in Clarke Quay over three consecutive nights.

Of course, I’ve been in two minds about attending this conference and, in fact, about the value of “creative industry” conferences in general (further thoughts, here, here and here). Moreover, I’ve found myself agreeing at times with local Hong Kong blogger, Hans Ebert, on the way these conferences might be keeping alive parts of the music industry that are past their use by date (check out BitchBack’s posts on MusicMatters).

But, as I mentioned last week, the organisers of MusicMatters seem to have sensed which way the wind is blowing and have adjusted their conference accordingly.

And, the tensions between the old and new parts of the business, cannot be erased: they reflect the situation music finds itself in today. The dinosaurs remain, even if companies like Apple or Google could pretty much buy the whole music industry tomorrow, if they were so inclined.

But, I’m not there to “talk to the majors” or “make big deals.” I’m there to meet, in the flesh, with fellow musicians, studio owners and technologists. I’m interested in conversations about what our collective present looks like and what we are doing to adjust to it. I’ll be writing here and on Twitter during the conference and if you have any questions you’d like to raise, or focus on, then please get in touch.

Of course, I’ll also be at MusicMatters to meet Singapore-based musicians and music industry people. The ones I met at last year’s conference impressed me and I’m already getting a good vibe from the pre-conference electronic exchanges with some folks.

So, no pie in the sky futurism, no revolutionary new platforms, no delusions of returning to the pre-digital models. Just cold, steely-eyed realism about making music in a leaner world, digitally-dependent world. I’m hoping to break bread and share a drink with anyone who has a positive, nuts and bolts approach to sharing good new music with the world.

Optimistic? Me? This time, yes!