This past February I had the opportunity to attend the 12th SF MusicTech Summit, thanks to a last-minute guest pass from Girls In Tech. Having been involved with both music and tech for the vast majority of my life, I was doubly excited for the event. It had been ages since I’d been to an event like this one. I think the last had been the Digital Music Forum West back in 2007 in Los Angeles.
registration desk
San Francisco has long been known as a home to pioneers, risk-takers, creative types, and forward thinkers. Having just relocated to the area from Seattle a few months prior, I was eager to check out a summit that converged around two of my favorite things – music & technology – and was taking place in my new city. Would I encounter the curly-mustached skinny jean wearing hipsters holding cans of PBR at breakfast that I was accustomed to seeing in Seattle? Would I encounter the glammed-out name dropping music execs I saw hanging out in Hollywood when I attended the Digital Music Forum West conference? After a short Uber hop from the Caltrain station over to Hotel Kabuki in Japantown, I was about to find out.
yours truly 
The first session I attended was on centered around how we’ll experience music in the future. A colorful session to say the least, with lots of heated opinions from the audience in response to some of the panelists. The first thing that struck me was the interesting backgrounds the speakers had. People from Sonos, a founding member of Gang of Four, a professor with branding experience, and a Skype/Rdio exec. A lot of the topics that came up were ones I’ve seen discussed in music circles for a while now – Will streaming ever become mainstream? How do we deal with big record companies who are a total pain?
future of music panel
The exec from Rdio shared the insight that there’s a huge longtail of songs/artists in their vast online music library that receive few/no plays. So the challenge becomes how do you surface those artists to users? There’s a massive curation challenge when there’s so much music out there, and so many new songs being uploaded by users every day. It’s a challenge I remember from my days during my internship at Rhapsody – how do you get users to dig into your music collection and understand the value of a streaming service, when everything under the sun is at your fingertips? Apparently there’s no easy answer to this, because it’s a question the music industry has been struggling with for the last 9 years.
this guy kept interrupting the panelists
Other interesting tidbits from this session included a quote from Dave Allen, who said “You don’t have to like wearing vests to like Mumford and Sons.” Totally random, but totally classic. As with any conference filled with music folks, there were a lot of F-bombs being thrown around, and a lot of strong reactions from the audience in response to new ideas about technology & the impact it might have. One panelist spoke about how new algorithms can simulate human playing and someday we might be able to program sequences that are indistinguishable from real playing. This drew a really heated response from the audience and one person who’s daughter was a pianist. “How can you possibly replace a real person? My daughter is a professional that’s trained for years, it’s impossible!” While I get her point, I also saw it as a reaction against change. “We’re human, we’re important.” We all want to believe it. But sometimes it’s just not true.
attendees in the networking lounge at SF Music Tech XII
Another interesting session I attended was one on digital DJ’ing. Lots of things in the game have changed since I started out 13 years ago. Turntables are dead. Vinyl is dead. Modern DJ’s are using a mix of Ableton, Traktor, etc. and mixing not just full songs, but also snippets and other interesting clips into their mixes. The evolution of DJ controllers has catered to this new trend. The latest offerings from Numark, Native Instruments, etc. all have drum pads built in to the usual platter/mixer elements to let DJ’s cue and trigger additional elements. An exec from Beatport talked about how they were now offering “remix sets” that were packages that offered songs broken down into individual elements to give DJ’s more flexibility.
While still in its nascent stages, it’s a really exciting concept, and I’m really excited to see how the next crop of musicians and DJ’s will push things forward. If the indications from SF Music Tech XII are any indication, the future is bright!
the Beatport DJ booth
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