As the industry gears up for the annual Music Business Association conference in Atlanta on May 10-May 14, it should be noted that it’s been 13 years since the National Association of Recording Merchandisers rebranded as the Music Business Association, colloquially known as Music Biz. With the organization’s mission recast and widened beyond its initial mandate of serving music retailers, wholesalers and record label sales and distribution arms, its annual conference has become the place to be for discussions and examinations of all segments of the music industry— especially confronting new business issues as they arise. What’s more, its 68 year legacy as a music industry trade association is now in its seventh year under the guidance Portia Saban, who spoke to Billboard about what to expect at this year’s conference; as well as their Emerging Strategies track and live music programming.
Related
So, how’s the convention shaping up?
Oh, it’s shaping up really well. I’m excited. I think it’s gonna be super fun. [First off], people are getting better at putting in proposals for the panels. That’s how we program the conference, by asking the industry for panel proposals. People are sort of figuring out that the Music Biz is really the place to talk about the issues that the industry wants to talk about. So, we’re getting less self-promotional proposals; this year, we mainly got well-thought-out proposals on really important topics that people want to talk about.
What about attendance, how’s that going?
Attendance is shaping up fine. It’s a weird thing because the hotel always sells out way early, but we get 75% of our registrations in the last six weeks before the conference. That’s because often it’s from companies that took a block of 20 rooms in advance, but waited until six weeks before to put names on those rooms.
Is attendance going to be comparable with last year? What about the international presence?
Last year, we thought it would be about 2,200, but in the end it was about 2,000. This year, we are anticipating about the same amount of attendees. And yes, international presence is really good. We’re at par right now with where we were last year, when we had folks from 30-plus countries.
Is the Trump chaos, which is at maximum volume right now, impacting the convention’s attendance?
I would imagine, maybe internationally. There have been certain companies who said that they are not traveling at all. So yes, there are folks who have chosen not to come because of the Trump chaos. But there are others who are happy to come. It seems to be very individual and from what country you’re coming from, right? We have a bunch of Italian companies and French companies that are coming.
How many tracks and sessions are there this year?
Besides the community lounge and partners hub and others like that, there are 19 tracks and 127 sessions.
It’s sometimes difficult to attend every panel you might want to attend because there are so many of them.
The scheduling can be difficult to assemble into a grid but Nicole [Hennessey, Music Biz vp and director of communications] is sort of an alchemical genius in how she makes it all fit. We have reduced the number of sessions because we want quality, not quantity. But even with that, the scheduling can be difficult with overlaps unless we add a fifth day of panels, which nobody wants.
Getting back to the programming, how is it different than last year?
One thing that we’re not having this year is an AI (artificial intelligence) track. Because everybody wants to talk about AI, it will be throughout the program in all the different tracks.
It’s always fun for me when we do the programming to put things together and create tracks. So, we have a new track this year called Emerging Strategies, because one of the things I noticed in the proposals was a lot of people are trying to figure out, how do we work in this world given the way that technology has changed. Or how do you deal with the way that social media has developed, because every year it’s different? It used to be everyone concentrating on playlists, and then everybody had to be on TikTok.
So, it’s more than figuring out the next big social fad?
Emerging strategies looks at what people are doing to create a successful release to support an album campaign and an artist in the current moment. It’s about using the conference to talk about these types of up-to-date issues.
Are there any other new tracks?
We also have what we call workflow workshop. That’s one of my favorites because when I was running a label [Kill Rock Stars] the part that I always enjoyed was looking at how you do your job. When you are in the room with a bunch of other people who also run independent record labels, it was fascinating because we could talk to each other about how we do it, and you gain insight from conversations like that. And part of this [Music Business Association] organization that I really appreciate is how we give people the opportunities to get in the room with other people who do the same job, and you can learn from each other.
The International Council Of Shopping Centers trade organization had a mantra: “If I have a penny and you have a penny and we exchange pennies, we each still only have one penny. But if I have an idea and you have an idea and we exchange ideas, then we each have two ideas.“
That’s awesome, and that’s what I think is great about going to the Music Biz conference, because it always gets into the nuts and bolts of the industry, rather than the glamor. That’s exactly how I got to learn how the industry was running.
Staying on the programming front, one thing I have noticed is that it seems much more oriented this year to the creator economy than it has in the past.
I think that’s such a big piece of the puzzle that everybody’s sort of struggling with and figuring out how do we integrate this into what we do? The music business is always interesting because it’s 50% put your head in the sand, and 50% “oh, crap, we got to figure this out.” This moment is very much we’ve been putting our head in the sand for a while, but this technology is really outstripping us, and we better pay attention because this is where money is being made, and anywhere that money is being made is something that we need to pay attention to.
I must applaud Music Biz for the hotel, which physically is one of the best I have ever been to in terms of conference navigating the hallways. On the other hand, some attendees last year were annoyed that the conference wasn’t in downtown Atlanta.
It’s a little hard to judge what people are going to think, but we’re just pulling data every year to try and make the conference better. We are excited about moving the conference to San Diego in 2027, which we haven’t officially announced yet.
In terms of the programming, I don’t see any keynotes on the schedule?
We sort of moved away from keynotes. Instead, we are having what we’re calling featured speakers, so almost each track has a featured speaker. Instead of trying to gather everybody in one place, I think spreading it and sprinkling it around is wiser.
I see there is publishing track, which I plan on attending.
That’s a growing segment for us. We have more publishers every year coming to music biz, which is great, so that’s a good one.
What other new type of proposals did you get for programming?
It’s fun to see what people are excited about when we get their proposals. We got like seven proposals for kids interacting with music and I think we got three on the schedule, which became one of the tracks: Kids’ Bop: Reaching Music’s Youngest Fans. And those panels cover it from both directions. It’s kids as consumers of music and it’s also kids as creators of music and also looking at some of the spaces, like video games, in which kids are interacting with music.
There also seems to be a fair amount of parties on the schedule, which I always like, but is there a trade show?
We are doing activations and those activation spaces are like a trade show and are up on that second floor, although we have a couple down on the first floor as well for people to show off their stuff. So, we’ve got people coming to show stuff.
And what about live music?
We’re going to have two performers at the Bizzy awards, and I think the Spotify party might have a DJ again. I’m not sure what Vevo is doing for their event; and after Vevo RAMPD the [charitable] music organization to support people with disabilities] are doing a disco party. Also, we are working on getting some live music for the breakfast. We are also doing two free buffet breakfasts on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, followed by some of our State of the Union type programming. One day it’s going to be RIAA, and the other day it’s Luminate. We’re also hoping we are going to get some live acoustic music for then, because nobody wants a metal band at 8:30 in the morning when you are eating breakfast.
Well, I wouldn’t mind it, but that’s just me. What’s going on with the Music Business Association beyond the convention?
In January we did our third “Trust and Safety Symposium” in New York; and we will continue to do that. The Music Business Association is a founding member of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance. And we do a ton of webinars. We have my podcast [The Future of What], and we have the Keeping Tempo newsletters, and we do the Music Biz road show every now and then around the country. Also, we’ve been starting to push global events.
Yes, didn’t you do something with CES?
Last year, we set up a partnership with CES, [the Consumer Electronics Show] and had a one-day event [the Music Biz Summit] piggybacking on their CES [Unveiled] Europe event in Amsterdam last year and we are doing the same thing this year in Milan in October. Their programming is very focused on startups, so last year we brought two panels of folks who have either started up companies themselves or are, like, licensing specialists. We talked about stuff like, “If you’re a European start-up and you want to license music for your product, and bring it to the U.S. market, what type of differences are you looking at? What kind of things do you need to worry about?” That was one of my favorite events last year because it was so useful. Everybody in that room learned something.
