Lee presents Javier Lopez, manager of Midem with the Ditto Music 2010 compilation CD.

It was our fourth year attending Midem this year. When we first tripped over to Cannes, back in 2007 it was a different industry. Several weeks before, we had  launched the first unsigned artist ever into the UK top 40 singles chart. Even though digital was on the way in, it was still very much bombarded with physical releases. CD manufacturers were prevalent, major labels occupied large stands and huge deals were done on the spot.

Lee meets the guys from Music New Zealand and presents them with our CD sampler.

Looking forward to 2010 and Midem was dominated by digital start ups, phone companies and new technology. One of the names on everyones lips was MusicDNA which is being tipped to replace MP3’s.  MusicDNA is a service that lets you find out more about the music you like and helps you discover new things to listen to. It is an index of musicians – composers, performers, bands, artists, producers – their music, and the events that link them with you the listener.  It’s been developed by Dagfinn Bach, who worked on the world’s first MP3 player in 1993.

Jay presents Soundcloud with the Ditto 2010 compilation CD.

Notable speakers included Pharrell Williams and Pete Wentz and although they weren’t the most illuminating speakers of the conference (Pharrell did confess to being very under the weather) , they were upbeat about the future of the music industry and the struggle of monetizing digital. Pharrell has released a great new site called www.artsts.com to help kids get all kinds of art into the public eye. He was genuinely enthused to be the keynote speaker and sharing ideas and opinions. Shazam confirmed that they are now selling over 300,000 songs per day. New start ups like Band Central and Split gigs were selected with another 13 companies in the top 15 music start up companies. We will have more on partnerships with these great companies soon.

Band Central with our Midem sampler.

Jay and i were busy getting the Ditto Midem sampler into as many hands as possible and we had some great meetings with labels, publishers, digital companies from all over the world. Although the numbers were down around 13% this year, the new under 26 discount meant that 30% of people were attending for the first time, which was a positive thing.

There were the general cliches of ‘new model’ and major labels being evil but there were some great new ideas coming to the forefront. A great thing for Ditto Music is that just three years ago we were trying to explain to industry execs what our business model was, now it is seen as the natural progression to an evolving industry.

And finally, it wouldnt be Midem without the odd celebrity popping up. Was great to hook up with Coolio, Goast and everyone who came over from Vegas.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 3:11 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.