Today was the first of two days of the “Music On Internet: Information – Promotion – Distribution” conference, a fascinating conference discussing many interesting issues related to music today. The topics and speakers today really exhibited a real breadth and depth of knowledge and included some pretty eminent people (i.e. the president of EMI Music Poland).
Today’s discussions covered issues distribution of music on the internet and concerns and education regarding using the internet as a tool and venue for one’s music, the digitalization of music and issues regarding that (from very deep technical discussions on bitrates and quality to practical concerns on audio file formats), as well as issues on the music business and a window into the business of music on the internet.
The conference today made me think a great deal about my own music and how best to manage my own work, both for ease of access and archiving, as well as what are the ways in which to share one’s music with others. (It reminded me of an old idea I had for a software project that could archive music and would do so in lossless format and automatically create compressed versions as well as data formats for information for things like podcasts, websites, etc. I’d like to believe that software like this is already available though and open source, but if not, perhaps something to invest some time in.)
A great first day of conference papers and tomorrow the schedule looks to be just as interesting and perhaps even more focused on issues that concern content producers(composers, performing artists) and how the internet plays a part now.
Tonight, another Warsaw Autumn concert: Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Quaderno di strada”! (This whole festival has been absolutely fantastic, and I’m sure I will have much to think about and much more to write about after the festival is finished when there is time to reflect and review the concert.)