River of ice outside the hotel
I’ve spent the last few days in Helsinki at a music industry conference called Is This It.
Since I’m not that great at mingling (or at least, slow to start), I brought my laptop down to the first networking breakfast session on Friday. Coffee and email, while people settled in around me.
Since the breakfast merged into the keynote presentations, I thought I’d just post interesting bits and pieces from the sessions up to Twitter. I was the only one doing it, by all accounts, and I thought it might be useful.
But very quickly, it became clear that the messages were not those I tend to talk about on my New Music Strategies blog. This was old school stuff, entrenched. And while they were looking for new models, it was like they were looking for different ways to do more or less exactly the same things. And I started to say so.
And while I met and spent time with some really nice and very cool people – quite a bit of the time, the ideas bouncing around the conference – especially from the stage – were neither nice nor cool. Not just 1970s music business concepts – but 1970s concepts of all descriptions. Suffice to say, there were some things discussed that made me somewhat uncomfortable.
As it happens, towards the end of the event, I was invited up on stage with one of the round table panel moderators to put forward a bunch of ideas that our group had come up with. Fortunately, I’d been in a group with my friend Mike McNally and we’d had a great discussion.
But I also took the opportunity to also apologise for the fact that I didn’t have any misogynistic comments, homophobic jokes or references to addiction or gambling as models for music industry business to offer, which – as you can imagine, went down splendidly.
Loved Helsinki to bits – but kind of happy to be on the way home. I get the feeling that not everyone welcomed my input…
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[...] interested, most of it was documented in my twitter stream – and given the fact that I was actually moved to get up on stage and make a pointed comment about the recurring misogyny and homophobia, as well as the worrying [...]
5 Comments
Actually, I really enjoyed the Twitter feed on Friday. I was sat in my office with TweetDeck open on the Mac, practically in hysterics at the thought of you trying to get through the keynote.
I was also following some of your Twitter feed, and was chuckling at some of your comments. I’ve heard some people say that the old model IS the new model, but somehow I doubt it. Either we grow with the changes, run with the punches or become completely irrelevant as an industry.
I enjoyed the feed, but initially (when i didn’t know where you were etc) thought you were joking much of the time.
soon i realized you were at a serious conference, and then after each tweet, the hashtag just looked to me like #thisisshit
could imagine you sitting there seething at some of it. still, good to know what people are thinking.
I totally enjoyed the Twitter feed, it kept me going through a rough entrepreurship assignment. A few of the tweets were LOL.
Helsinki’s a cool city – fond memories of eating a reindeer on the waterfront in spring sunshine.
er… that should be “reindeer kebab”. Not whole animal.