“The Future of……” Next!
I had the pleasure of being invited by the University Of Wales, Newport to take part in something called the Future Music Lab at their Creative Capital event this week. Before arriving I had no idea what the agenda was other than that I was to take part with other ‘industry experts’ in a two-day sandpit event. The first day kicked off with presentations delivered by Huw Stephens, Jeremy Silver, Gerd Leonhard and Ron Berry (working on the Isle of Mann flat-rate for music). And the second day saw us delve deeper into the ‘lab’ aspect of the event, working in teams to explore the future of music over the next 10 years time and developing ideas alongside. Personally, as someone who is no longer in the business of actually ’selling’ music, I thought there was slighlty too much focus on the future of the existing music industry rather than simply the music ecosystem itself. But the discussions on the whole were quite thought-provoking.
I’m not sure how many tangible results the lab itself actually yielded, but for me that wasn’t necessarily the point. It certainly provides a good platform for further work to be done by and with the University. I also enjoyed two days of exchanging ideas and expressing points of view with a group of peers from right across the music industry. And the whole event was superbly put together.
But as we sat down on the first evening to enjoy the dinner and the catwalk show that the University’s fashion students had put on I stopped for a few minutes to check Twitter and noticed some relevant and wise words from the Hype Machine’s Anthony Volodkin (@fascinated)
I see a lot of value in the two days I had at Creative Capital. And one of the reason’s why I setup the OpenMusicMedia meetup was because I firmly believe that it’s important to educate and connect people in order to push things forward (the majority of the established music industry is still so hung up on the past, even now).
But it’s important to remember that it’s a hell of a lot easier to ‘talk’ about the future of something than it is to actually do it.
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I hear what your saying about doing rather than talk… This event did go against the grain of your conventional business orientated debate. Part of the remit was to bring together a platform of cross industry experience into one room to facilitate the type of conversation that may not normally take place in groupings of like minded individuals….. Part of my problem with the ‘just do it’ approach is that it generally only follows economic concerns without the wider remit of political and cultural implications. It was a great pity that we didn’t get into the IP punch up and other mechanisms that are the debate of legislation….
The ‘Future’ tag… yeah …it seems desperately overused in the present - so why did we call ourselves Future Music Lab ? I must admit when I first heard it had been called that I knew it would attract this type of commentary for which I’m in agreement with you on the whole…However I think for a university which is so intrinsically tied up with the growth of future generations it has a certain validity. You may have noticed on the FML blog that were kinda big on the Attali text - Noise. Music is prophetic and something is definitely going on at the moment…