Tomorrow (March 31) the Music Week Tech Summit will gather the stars of the music and tech sectors to debate a range of key issues, from gaming and livestreaming, to podcasts and portals for our first-ever virtual event.
Just some of the all-star speakers lined-up for this year’s edition are Tap Music’s Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, MOBOs founder Kanya King, TikTok’s head of UK music operations Paul Hourican, Jessie Ware, Clara Amfo, YouTube’s director of YouTube Music, EMEA Dan Chalmers and many, many more.
Also set to appear for a special presentation are our headline sponsors TagMix.
No strangers to the Tech Summit, the company were a featured start-up at our inaugural event in 2018. Our headline sponsors solve the problem of poor quality UGC audio by delivering an innovative cloud-based software solution directly to fans – replacing the audio taken on videos by users at concerts, clubs and festivals with a real-time, pro-audio stream, straight from the mixing desk.
Here, in an exclusive opinion piece, Andy Dean, CEO and co-founder of TagMix, writes about new opportunities to help the post-Covid music industry recover…
When venues finally reopen ‘post pandemic’ later this year, what happens inside will need to be seen by more people outside.
There will still be those unwilling to mingle and travel on overcrowded transport networks to inside spaces frequented by complete strangers who may have been exposed to new variants of viruses as of yet unknown…
Chances are that it will be the lucky ones, the few selected, tested and vaccinated music fans who are permitted to go through the venue doors that finally get to experience performances once more… And it will be their job to tell the rest of us how much of a good time they had and why we need to bother getting ourselves off the sofa, away from digital performances and physically present at the band’s next show!
To make this happen, venues will need to be ready and equipped to deal with the ‘new normal’. They will also need to consider how they can enhance fan engagement to deliver an experience that, put simply, cannot be replicated to the same standard if you are not inside the venue. One of the ways of bringing fans and artists closer at live performances is the introduction of new technologies that improve how people share content.
What immediately stands out when considering the potential pain points of capturing content is the very poor audio quality that comes when recording live video. It seems crazy that as a music fan you invest lots of energy and money in going to see your favourite artist yet when you share that experience the audio sounds dreadful. And it certainly doesn’t deliver the sound that the artist would want you to hear either.
TagMix have worked on solving this problem by creating a piece of software that replaces the recorded audio with a professional soundtrack. By taking a feed from the mix engineer at the show, we are able to create an enhanced piece of superior media that better represents both the artist and their performance.
This type of tech opens up all sorts of new creative and revenue generation opportunities for the whole music ecosystem. It initiates a direct communication channel to the artist’s fans that can be elevated to a transactional relationship for merchandise, tickets, drinks and digital assets. It uniquely provides live music reference files that track all social media posts from the show giving rights holders the ability to potentially monetise this User Generated Content (UGC). And it gives the venues a huge value add.
Part of being able to successfully navigate this new digital landscape is to look for ways that deliver benefits to all parties - from fans to artists to venues, promoters, brand and rights holders. During a period where a large part of the music landscape has been decimated by Covid, we all need to be looking for ways to bring the industry back together and back on its feet so that we can collectively drive positive change and pave a growth path for the future. This is just one way of doing that. It seems a no brainer.
TagMix will present at the Music Week Tech Summit at 12pm. Book your tickets here.
