Just back from Popkomm, and carrying a major let lag. I love the event and Berlin is perhaps my favorite city on the planet. Great art scene, friendly people, awesome music.

This year there were over 70 bands booked at the festival using Sonicbids. I found the overall music portion of Popkomm very well organized and (at least the showcases that I went to) very well attended. That’s half the battle when you do these showcases, making sure that people actually show up. The venues and sound were also top notch.

We also hosted our usual member dinner in Berlin and we had, I think, eight members including Astrid Swan and NazB who were showcasing at Popkomm later that week. I found the dinner fascinating because this was the first truly international member get-together we hosted: we had members from Israel, Ireland, Nigeria, Switzerland, Finland and of course Germany. Tess and Aliki from our team did a great job setting the dinner up.

What amazes me the most about these dinners is how similar the issues that musicians face are, regardless of the passport they carry. I think the main thing that stuck with me after the dinner is that a) we need to invest even more to get local gig listings for bands in Europe; and b) governments tend to be a lot more helpful in Europe in terms of funding bands to tour overseas, which presents all kinds of opportunities.

Other than that, I participated on a great panel about Radiohead’s “In Rainbows”. It was the first year anniversary of the release of the record, a major milestone for the music business. (“In Rainbows “ of course was the first album released by a major band to be offered for a pay-what-you-want fee).

Some cool stuff we talked about:

•    Even though fans could get the record free through the band’s website, illegal activity was just as intense. Why? Because consumers like to get music through their preferred channels.

•    Build a brand. Radiohead was able to leverage all the publicity they got from the (free) album release to sell out their tour, sell merchandise and of course up-sell fanatics their limited edition boxed set.

•    On the same brand theme, amazingly, because Radiohead is known as an “album” band, very few people downloaded individual tracks even though the option was there. Consumers went for the full album because the brand Radiohead calls for it to get the full experience.

I’ll talk more about the need to build your brand in a subsequent post.

Panos

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