The recent Digital Summit at Belmont University, sponsored by Leadership Music, was a day well spent. The idea was to touch on all things digital that matter or perhaps should matter to the Nashville music business. And it attracted an impressive cross-section of the community: Songwriters. Artists. Labels, of course. Marketing folks. Online guys. New media authors.
In general, we heard entrepreneurial types from Nashville mix it up with leading lights from around the policy and business world.
Keynoter Steve Schnur came from the world of video games. He has the fabulous title Worldwide Executive of Music and Audio for Electronic Arts, the enormous game company. He called gaming the new rock and roll. Not a venue for rock and roll. But rock itself. Rebellion in a nutshell. Adults don’t get it, and all that. Then he produced some startling predictions about the size and growth path of gaming, which is zooming past movies and television as the biggest force in culture and mindshare among those under 25. Schnur, sort of a rock star in his own terrain, is not only putting rap stars in the games themselves (as avatar basketball players) he’s breaking acts and trying to sign talent and get good music (or at least memorable, hit potential music) in his games. He estimated the number of ear impressions his biggest songs in his biggest games make on kids’ ears in the billions, far beyond radio. It was, in short, a hype-fest for games, and perhaps a justifiable one. I told a colleague from the Americana music business that I particularly liked the soundtrack to Wipeout Pure on my PlayStation Portable, and he said I didn’t look like that type of guy.
The morning’s copyright discussion, probably my favorite thing of the day, included Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, the head of the RIAA, the top lobbyists for the music publishers, and a honcho from Microsoft (Gates was unavailable as he was hosting the premiere of China at his home). The only voice on the side of freer copyright was Jon Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association, which represents webcasters, digital distributors and other folks who would like to be creative in the new media space and who would like some clarity and reasonableness about licensing content. I find they make a lot more sense on issues like compulsory licensing than the big content owners, but that’s another post.
The last panel of the day featured Belmont students and an FBI agent, seated far apart from one another, for a candid discussion about who downloads what and how the status quo (a mix of piracy, enforcement, and experimentation) helps or hinders their development as music consumers. Two said they rarely or never download music, pirate or paid. But they at least hinted that they traded ripped and burned music regularly. (Other data at the summit indicated burn piracy is bigger economically than p2p sharing.) One kid was crazy about iTunes. But another pointed to the gaps in the major label download business by relating that just the night before he’d tried to find a certain Led Zeppelin track on two legal services before giving up and grabbing it off a p2p site.
Michael Harrington of Belmont said prosecution of music snatchers continues to be counterproductive and that digital rights management is a waste of investment. Veteran songwriter Fred Knobloch was fabulous. His astonishment at how little young people ask of their music is a lot like mine. What good is infinite choice when you don’t listen to the stuff you have every day with real attention? What’s so great about music all over the place, all the time. What does living inside headphones do to your ability to take in music as a communal social experience? And does the celestial jukebox really belong on a cell phone? There are many good answers to all these questions. So it was good to see an event in Nashville that brought together so many for so much progress on so important a front.
Comments