12:00pm The Site Doctor Is In (with Project 83)
Nick Francis, founder of Project83 talks about improving websites. He uses data from Google and Amazon to show that quicker loading times make a significant difference in how the user participates with the site. They also brought up a pet peeve of mine, ‘the broken back button’, which is when a site’s url stays the same no matter what you click on. They also designed this year’s nbnsummit.com.
12:30pm Will the Last Consumer Please Turn Out the Lights?
Ken Sparks of Spotify, Russ Crupnick, Sr. Vice President of Myspace Marketing and a few others state the obvious: the music industry is in a transitioning period. There’s a lot of talk about streaming music and Ariel Hyatt of Ariel publicity & Cyber PR explains how smaller bands can make a decent living with licensing their work to tv shows and other clever ways of engaging with their audience.
1:10pm How Many Pennies Does It Take To Make a Dollar?
A sequel to the last panel. Memorable speakers include Jeff Price, CEO of TuneCore and Richard Gottehrer. Price would often hijack the conversation in a positive fiery rant declaring that more artists are making money off music today than ever before. Gottehrer didn’t speak much, but when he did everyone listened. As an older music business entrepreneur, Gottehrer had some valuable incite on past and present versions of the music machine.
2:25pm New Challenges and Opportunities for Song Writers and Music Publishers
Although his piracy induced rage was fun to laugh at, David Isrealite had some interesting points to make concerning illegal music consumption. Bills are being passed that will allow the government to easily take over a domain name that hosts leaked content. If the site is overseas they can take measures to remove the supplier from search engines. At one point he stated that people are more willing to download peer to peer files despite their low quality and possible viruses. I’ve found that illegal options are usually higher than what itunes has to offer. Someone please tell me why itunes doesn’t host 320kbps files.
2:55pm Case Study – Search Party Music w/ Randall Poster (famous music supervisor)
Fact: every music blogger wants to get paid to utilize their infinite knowledge of great jams. Reality: becoming a successful music supervisor is really hard. Poster’s work with Wes Anderson and the recent HBO series “Boardwalk Empire” were more than enough to launch me into fanboy mode as Poster eloquently answered questions from Jason Moon Wilkins, CEO of NBN. Poster mentioned “American Graffiti” as one of his favorite soundtracks and briefly touched on his relationship with Anderson after I was able to squeeze in the panel’s last question.
8:30pm Jasmine Kaset @ The Basement
With refreshingly normal delivery and above average lyrics, Jasmine Kaset was a fun way to launch the live portion of this years Next Big Nashville. Listen to “Riding in the Car with the Dog” and imagine my frustration when the song ends after 41 seconds.
Jasmine Kaset – Riding in the Car with the Dog
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9:15pm The Extraordinaires @ The Basement
Story driven talent from Philadelphia, The Extraordinaires have a contagious live energy that was fun to be a part of. I caught a few nods to Neutral Milk and Pavement in their work.
The Extaordinaires – The Arsonist
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9:45pm The Mynarbirds @ Mercy Lounge
ZZzzZZzzzZ
10:30pm David Bazan @ Mercy Lounge
more ZzzZzz. I admit he’s a talented dude, but I was never a big Pedro fan.
