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Business News Education & Events The Great Escape 2011 Top Stories
The Great Escape concludes
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 16 May 2011
The Great Escape, Europe’s leading festival for new music and the UK’s biggest music business convention, climaxed on Saturday night with an exuberant headline set from Sufjan Stevens and many more newer bands playing to an excitable audience of industry players and music fans.
Over the three-days at the CMU-programmed Great Escape convention over 100 industry leaders and innovators took part in talks, debates and interviews, offering opinions, insights and case studies on all aspects of the modern music business, and especially the challenges of developing and monetising new talent in the digital age.
Keynotes came from PRS For Music’s Will Page, Topspin’s Ian Rogers, Bandcamp’s Andrew Dubber, Soundcloud’s Dave Haynes, HMV’s Simon Fox and the BPI’s Tony Wadsworth, the latter launching a new research report he has penned for MusicTank on the changing shape of the record company. DJ Shadow, Frank Turner and Paul Epworth were in conversation, while four great music start-ups got to present to a panel of music business experts and three artist managers pitched ideas to three brand managers, each with mini-sponsorship budgets to spend.
In a more relaxed Saturday programme, John Robb was joined by MPs Kerry McCarthy and Mike Weathley and musicians Adam Ficek and Chris T-T to discuss piracy, drugs, visas and a raft of other political issues. Later CMU Business Editor and Great Escape Convention Programmer Chris Cooke chatted to Chris Swanson and Mark Jones, founders of the Secretly Canadian and Wall Of Sound labels respectively, before Music Week’s Stephen Jones chaired the first ever Heroes & Villains panel, which saw four industry veterans – including surprise guest Seymour Stein – speaking very much off the record about their artist experiences.
Commenting on the proceedings, the aforementioned Cooke said: “When we were asked to programme The Great Escape convention we wanted to create a practical, forward looking, enlightening and entertaining conference, and from the feedback we’ve received so far, and our monitoring of the social networks, that seems to have been achieved. We must thank all our content partners, speakers, delegates and the big team of volunteers who made this happen. Hopefully this year’s delegation will spread the word so we can make TGE2012 even bigger and better, the ultimate forum for networking, debating and idea sharing in the new music business”.
We’ll have a series of reports on The Great Escape panels here in the CMU Daily later this week, while right now you can listen to an albeit rather tired sounding Cooke and CMU Editor Andy Malt discussing the best bits on the CMU Weekly podcast – check it at www.soundcloud.com/cmu or via iTunes here. Highlights of the convention will also be available on SoundCloud from later this month.
