Back from Canada
I’m back from my half a week trip to Canada. First to Toronto and then to Vancouver. So a bulleted list is in order:
Mesh was great, and it was fantastic to talk to Matt with tons of people looking on about the challenges and I hope opportunities facing this business I find myself in.I think a lot of people look at the music business and assume everyone in it is evil or what not. The fact is, we all, or at least those that I work with, love music to death and want nothing more than to steer this big machine into a new era and practices. I don’t see why it can’t be done.
Blog coverage is here and some mainstream news here . A lot of the press assumes that I work at Warner Music Group. I don’t. I work at Warner Bros. Records, wholly owned, independently operated. We have our own servers, infrastructure, software roadmap, roster, A&R, marketing, etc. We are also not part of Time Warner. That ended many many years ago.
From Mesh I went to Vancouver for time with R.E.M. Vancouver was their tour opener and I arrived the day before the show. R.E.M. is to me a second family so a tour is like summer camp, as its the one time everyone is together in one place. Amy joined me in Vancouver which made it extra special.
The hightlights of Vancouver:
- An amazing dinner with REM’s manager, friends and Mike in Yaletown.
- An interesting van ride to the venue where Amy ensured the future of the band by fishing out a seat belt from the seat
- A relaxing day at Deer Park where the wi-fi was better than at the hotel. I got work done, setup the Shozu phone for the show, twittered and blogged
- Meeting Johnny Marr
- Seeing all the different ways the band eases into the full touring mode
- Modest Mouse and The National, both amazing opening acts
- And REM of course. A tremendous show, where I spent most of the time running around taking photos, twittering and video-blogging. Most of that is on the REM Tour site.
- Singing Gardening at Night at the side of the stage next to Johnny Marr who was doing likewise
- Meeting Douglas Coupland (again) and showing him my photos on my iPhone and camera
- A late night out to a club underneath a Howard Johnsons in east-Vancouver
Here are some photos. This week continues the REM theme with their show in LA and other events. More on Flickr.
I think your point in the second paragraph hits it right on the head — the music industry is not evil and totally screwed, they just need to hire more people like you to set everything straight. I constantly feel the need to be a music industry apologist almost, when really, a newspaper article I read about MySpace summed it up rather nicely: MySpace is a tech company incubated by old school media companies. They solved this problem by opening up an office up north and by hiring new-wave tech folks. The same might be able to be said about the music industry. Old school media just needs to hire new school tech people to run their new media areas, and the problem will be solved.
In other totally random news, I met with a guy tonight named Ali who apparently worked for you.
Great photos, by the way. Very sharp and vibrant, which is pretty nuts because the EXIF on some of these says they were taken at f/4. Was the lighting just surprisingly good at the show?
shozu phone, cool! Details please! N95 or n82?
Daniel – I have a 24-70 L lens which is 2.8 through the range. The lighting was really good, but not as bright as SXSW and with more variation, so it was hard to meter properly. I lost maybe 30% of shots because of the lighting.
Roland – N70, an old one I have that was sent to us by Shozu.
Also Daniel – we have the intention of hopefully branching my department into space up in the valley.