Music Nerdery and Me: Attending Music 2.0

Yestereve (I just really wanted to use that word), I had the pleasure of attending Music 2.0: Tools + Tech for Musicians, Marketers, + Managers. The event was held at Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center (NERD!). Hard to rally for a three-hour meeting after working all day, but I was rewarded by a surprise reunion with my homeboy Jared Mooney who owns Dirty Water Sound and Music. I have about five pages of notes, but I realize no normal human being would be at all interested in those. So, my personal highlights:

- Ryan Spaulding, local music blogger: "You can't fix everyone else's issues. So pay it forward and build relationships." and, in referring to self-promotion: "You gotta be respectful, but you gotta be ruthless." Preach.

- Music and Youth Initiative: a nonprofit founded because of cutbacks in music education... set up these "music clubhouses" in already established youth centers that provide everything necessary to teach music... Berklee provides work study students to teach music to under-served urban youth (Pro Tools, too! awesome!). As an aside: the presenter played a video and the audio levels were low. Someone yelled out "Hold a mic up to the speaker!" I know this sounds pretentious, but... REALLY?! At a music tech conference?! You HAVE to know that would cause the worst sound ever. Right? Right.

- Indie Ambassador "empowers the music entrepreneur by providing the tools and resources necessary to build a transparent, sustainable career." I'm still not totally clear as to what that means, but it sounds like a consulting situation to help musicians actually get money for what they're doing (?). It is currently in beta; we'll see where that goes.

- Marcus Whitney of Moontoast. Super cool. "Turning fans into sustainable business." Essentially, Moontoast has tools to embed music purchasing into Facebook and other social networking sites in order to "place the buying opportunity where the fan wants to be, not where you want them to go." It can embed audio purchasing for FREE and you/Moontoast get $ at point of purchase. Nice. 

- ZMX Music: you can sell your sheet music on your own page or via social media. Digital delivery means composer royalty percentages upped. Killer.

- Chris Marstall of Tourfilter: I have loved Tourfilter since its infancy. I heard of it through a pal of mine who worked with the developer (and I think there was a romantic connection there? I kept calling out her name under my breath to see if he reacted. I shouldn't have admitted that last thing.). You can choose the bands you love and Tourfilter will notify you when they're coming to town. It also has a full calendar option (which is brilliant for finding new acts when you're looking for something to do on any given evening). 

- And finally, what for me was the crowning presentation of the evening, Alistair Macdonald of Bocoup (click on "Javascript Sound" to see what I'm talking about. You can also check out the W3C Audio Working Group). Holy crap. I was freaking out. Essentially, this is a group working on Javascript coding for HTML5 that gives you waaaaaay more options for audio embedded in web pages. This stuck out to me because of my Sunday Sound series. Right now, if you don't have Flash (cough, iPhones, cough),  you can't play my audio pieces. BUT. This would be audio running in a browser using Javascript. Not Flash. Not Silverlight. AND. This would allow real-time audio adjustments (the presenter applied a low-pass filter on a track through a website!!). MIND BLOWN. And something I thought of... I wonder if this could lead to an online audio editor? AMAZING. 

Thank you, thank you to all the folks who made this event possible (namely Charles McEnerney). I am sooooo happy I forced myself to attack a 13 hour day. Hooray for Music 2.0!