There are a lot of tech start-up summits going on these days and we can’t help but say “Hell yes!” to each and every invitation.
Our most vibrant venture was to the San Francisco MusicTech Summit. With a whole gamut of music related technology on display, some of the brightest minds in the field converged upon San Francisco’s Kabuki Hotel in Japantown on November 10th 2015, to bond over a mutual passion for making, sharing and developing music-related applications with like-minded visionaries, engineers and musicians.
Photocredits: Scott Chernis
The San Francisco summit is a little different to the Dublin Summit we attended last year as this one is exclusively about music tech and is therefore the hotspot where start-ups and the music industry meet. Chordify was one of the ten winners of the 2015 SF MusicTech Summit Startup Innovators Challenge and were invited to pitch to a panel of investors. They had some tough questions but our guy in America, Marcus “Mr. Guitar Hero” Henderson quite literally rocked it, as you might expect from a professional guitar shredder, showing off Chordify with a hard rockin’ AC/DC song. Our friends from Dublin, cool start-ups SKIO Music and Uberchord were winners of the challenge in San Francisco too – it’s a small world!
Photocredits: Scott Chernis
The pros and cons of music streaming services
Fierce discussions were held with streaming service panelists about the positive and negative effects of companies like Spotify, Apple Music and Rhapsody. Very few musicians being satisfied with current distribution methods, while most agreed that everyone could do more for the industry by increasing shares for musicians and developing new royalty platforms.
The marriage of music & tech
The future of music tech is bright and its tools have become so efficient and accessible that the relationship between music and technology is now symbiotic. Artists are becoming ever more reliant upon computers to store, develop and share their ideas, while music drives the tech industry forward towards more innovative approaches, spawning such services as our very own Chordify and Audiokite, which gives musicians the ability to utilize big data, allowing them to seek out the niche audiences that will support their music and help grow their careers. Ten years ago, such concepts as these were almost nonexistent, because the old models for label support and distribution had complete control over the industry, but today, as we firmly believe at Chordify, anyone can become a rockstar!
But we also hold fast to the idea that no matter how advanced the tech or how quickly it changes, nothing surpasses the power of ten fingers on a keyboard, drum set or guitar. It’s what keeps us human, and nothing can crash, hack or disable an acoustic guitar. So with this in mind, we fearlessly lean forward into a new era of music tech, nodding appreciatively to the past while our eyes fix firmly on the future.