The 2013 New Music Seminar opens in New York Sunday night and runs through Tuesday, the fifth year since the conference was resurrected in 2009, after its original 16-year run ended in 1995. As with its original incarnation, the event exists to “discuss and debate challenges in the music business” and foster ways to grow the industry.
When the New Music Seminar was conceived in 1980, no clairvoyant could have predicted the phenomenal growth and subsequent crash of the business. Initially, sales of CDs exploded during the decade+ from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s as boomers replaced their aging vinyl collection with the shiny, “perfect” discs and MTV, Michael Jackson, and dozens of rock bands and hip hop acts took off simultaneously to fuel retail sales and arena/stadium tickets. But peer-to-peer sharing and years of overpriced discs and concert tickets led to a dramatic change for the worse in industry revenues.
In 2009, the NMS was re-launched by Tommy Silverman and Dave Lory, and as this year’s event commences, the industry is once again demonstrating growth in a multitude of fronts. Legal music sharing services are proliferating and gaining mass acceptance. While CD sales continue to drop, digital sales revenues rose 14% in 2012. And proving once again that what’s old is new, vinyl sales increased for the fifth straight year to reach their highest numbers since 1997.
The 2013 Seminar’s New York Music Festival opens Sunday night with a red carpet event at Webster Hall, headlined by The Soul Rebels, and continues each night through Tuesday at a variety of downtown clubs including Cake Shop and Tammany Hall. Tickets are available for conference attendees (with badges) and the public (for purchase) HERE. Among the acts performing during the three nights are The Postelles, 2AM Club, Baby Bee, The Grizzled Mighty, and dozens more. There’s a free show at Rockwood Music Hall on Monday night.
The New Music Seminar will host open-door A&R listening sessions for unsigned bands. The conference itself features a Who’s Who of record label execs, promoters, managers as well as such services as Spotify, Pandora, SiriusXM, and numerous industry start-ups. Among the panels that BestNewBands.com will be covering are “The Great Debate: Singles vs. Albums” and “The Independent Label Movement.” Other panels cover such topics as songwriting, YouTube, music subscription services, and so on.
While pre-registration is closed, you can still walk-up at the New Yorker Hotel, 481 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.
