MIDEM. Crisis, what crisis ?

Imagine a really cool semitropical French city. Now imagine it full of all the best and brightest in the music business. Brings to mind Ray Bans and limos doesn't it ? Thats MIDEM. The music biz annual get up in the south of France.

Well lets change the image slightly.
Turn off the heat so its cold and windy. Now remove all the rock and pop royalty. Not so cool anymore eeeh? Then get rid of all the label babes and fun people who used to populate the record business. Not much left anymore.

Well its a good and a bad thing. The good part is that you do not have to live in a roach infested dive because there are actually rooms vacant. Also, you can talk to the people you need to meet because no one there is kidding themselves that they don't need the next deal any more. Everyone is in dire straights. That is everyone apart from Sonicbids, thebizmo and all the companies rising to meet the fact that only a very limited amount of musicians will be flying in their own Lear jets in the future and your trusty band van will be more familiar to you than the inside of a limo.
The old business is dead. Face it. The sooner the better. The age of the mass of niches has arrived. Now all we need is for the artists in question to get their acts together, stop clicking around for more myspace friends and actually pick up the ball where they hoped some label would do it. Sure there are a bunch of hard working indies out there, but if you had real Learjet ambition you always dreamed of Universal music right?

Well stop it, wake up. there is nobody home there any more. The streets are cold and empty like the streets of Cannes.
But being inside a happening club, or behind your fave earphones is still the warmest and coolest place to be.
Remember it was always about the music. Make a living, have fun, get the girls (or guys) play loud and forget about the free ride .
It was never really free anyway
David

The DLD a whole bunch of new users and a really bad back

I have just sat through an incredible interesting three day conference in Munich called DLD or digital life design. It featured over 800 really smart guys and gals from art to tech discussing various aspects of the internet. Chad Hurley from Youtube, Marissa Mayer from google, Mark Zuckerberg from the dreaded facebook, and a German neuro scientist all taking very direct questions from this amazingly intelligent crowd.

One of the things discussed about at some length was how people behave badly and write appalling things under the cover of anonymity and how that demeans the strength and power that the net potentially has to change things. Do all debates on the internet have to collapse into personal insults and foul language? When does a moderator have to get into the conversation and edit it without limiting peoples freedom to express themselves. how can we deal with information overload and jurisdictional issues surrounding cloud computing.

While all this was going on my lower back decided to behave badly so I had a hard time concentrating on a few of the talks. On top of that my company thebizmo was just releasing its first ever promotional push and getting new users like crazy. our new users where emailing me with their various questions, and I am answering them as fast as humanly possible.
My wonderful and thoughtful German investors are looking for a chiropractor as I write this, so one more session, this time on the internet and financial turmoil and I will be off to the docs office to push me back into shape hopefully.