How to improve the Digital Music Forum West 2007

Published by on October 8, 2007


Well, it was a pretty exciting forum this year over at the Hollywood Roosevelt.

We had the usual cast of music industry major veterans like Alhby Galuten of Sony BMG and David Dorn of Warner toting the company line and pretty much refusing to answer any real questions about their companies and the future of the music industry; I guess the ringle is the future.

I made a lot of good connections at the forum, but that was by no means a result of the management of the whole event …

Here are a couple points of advice that might be helpful in attracting future guests:


Cater to your guests needs

After the conference, I’m kind of questioning my sexuality, as I spent an inordinate amount of time starting at men’s crotches trying to decipher what the hell their name tag actually says, and once I figure out what the hell it says, I then have to stare intently until I realize their badge says “Lawyer, Recording Industry Association of America,” and I’ve just wasted 5 minutes and gotten a couple of invitations back to their room to “network”.

When you come to a conference, you have a couple of goals: meet new people, gloat that you just went public or waste your fortune 500 company’s money. All of these people should be catered to differently (oh shit, what an insight !).

Make the name badges color coded

When I walk up to someone, I want to know if they are a label owner, an artist, or a content provider. And when I walk up to someone else, I want to know if they are a competitor of mine, and when talking to someone, I want to know if they have check writing ability (thanks Bill!).

Tell me who the hell is going to be at the conference!

Now I know you conference organizers are immediately grimacing in terror — “they might not want to come if they know who will be here !!”. How about this, let’s build a web 2.0 element into our site (as opposed to my 5th grade web project) that allows people to see who is going to be at the event I’m dropping my life savings on.

Require everyone to exchange business cards

Like a child preparing for his trip to the dentist, everyone likes to get home, and dump out their goody bag filled with more business cards than they can fit into their rolodex, and show their boss that this trip was fully justified, along with all of those mini-bar “networking” meetups.

Why don’t we require everyone who’s attending to provide, say 50 business cards, and all of these business cards would come in the goody bag that everyone gets. What’s that you say? That’s what sponsors are for? Oh yeah, I forgot, conferences are all about charging $5k to put a package of Deloitte M&Ms in a goody bag so I know who to talk to when I get audited.
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