Innovating Music: Tech & Transformation

Kwende Kefentse, both DJ Memetic and Music Lead for the City of Ottawa, and our host dig into the urban terrain, urban fabric, and politics of the city and music. He speaks deeply about urban terrain, urban fabric, and music, with the lens of "urban morphology" from his architecture studies in London and work with the city. He talks about topics as wide-ranging as the origins of hip hop...

We're just sharing quick news that we are now 4 years into the Innovating Music podcast adventures and thank you for your friendship and community.  We're shifting to Wednesday releases and planning upcoming live events/recordings.  Let us know of suggested events, places, and guests you would like to see in this continuing exploration of tech and social change around music.  Visit our website: ht...

Jesse Elliott helped create The Music District to support and work with music ecosystems in Ft. Collins, CO. He shares his earlier work with Richard Florida, his journey as a musician and a creative community organizer. Jesse shares the challenges and unique pilots that have worked locally, and his work with other communities globally. Guest: Jesse Elliott, Director, The Music District Jesse Ellio...

Andrew Goren at 20 has built Harmony Helper, a newly launched app, from his own experiences and observations in the live stage rehearsal and audition environment. He has built his undergraduate program around this work, and brought together a team of professionals to see it launched. Andrew shares some of that journey as well as his experiences in building and launching a product based on drawings...

Roman Rappak is forging ahead on two parallel tracks -- creating recorded music for traditional channels and creating new systems to create mixed reality experience with the same music in live environments. Enjoy this episode where he talks about what drives him on these parallel and interwoven journeys with his new band, Miro Shot, and how they are building their own systems and processes to...

Kristen Agee has made her way from classical violin in Oklahoma to touring and studio bass to . . . CEO of a production music, publishing, and custom music company. She has built a one-stop shop and has learned a lot along the way. She shares the power of Asking, including her story about asking for bass guitar lessons from Darryl Jones. She launched 411 Music Group in 2014 as a way to find longev...

Omid Rahmat came into the music business from the tech and app world in order to solve music creation workflow problems with Joyner Lucas and Dhruv Joshi -- and now solves them for more than 350,000 creators through the Tully App. He talks in this podcast episode about ways to limit tech and financial overhead costs for entrepreneurial song creators. Omid brings us along on his journey in his team...

Ed Goldfarb sees and hears differently. Where you and I might be just talking, he is hearing background music and seeing the notes in a manuscript. Ed shares with us his journey from professionally accompanying performances as a youth to creating live music for years for Beach Blanket Babylon in the Bay Area in California . . . to creating hundreds of motifs and a multi-location production team ar...

Matthew Ché Kowal is innovative in looking at a very specific set of overlaps in music. He has parlayed his experience in running festivals focusing on sustainability into work focused on mass gatherings. What can emergency workers learn from music festivals? What can festivals do to help heal from disasters? Matthew will talk about how he is bringing these two questions and other challenges toget...

Hazel Savage and her co-founder Aron Pettersson have built Musiio in Singapore to bring artificial intelligence to the messy large data sets of the music industry. She shares her own past in retail and streaming music in the UK and Australia, then shares how and why they formed Musiio. It already has a unique and distinctive role in tagging mass music data sets. She shares how that is different th...

Don and Peter shared their experience performing music ecosystem audits for four cities. The 2015 Austin Music Census and their continuing studies of Charlotte, Pittsburgh, and Washington DC are more than doing a venue count. They gather the personal, qualitative stories of local life as an artist and musician in a community. They also began to take a look at what really then happens post-study wi...

Jeremy Gruber enjoys connecting artists, creators, and social impact forces directly with fans. He shared his adventures with Friends at Work, working with not only John Legend and Lindsey Stirling, but also emerging artists. We discussed the current state of streaming, playlists, and algorithms. He also shared his adventures in launching the music ad platform Found.ee. Guest: Jeremy Gruber,...

Shelita joins the podcast to share how as an artist she uses data and emotions to connect with fans and create community -- and to create music itself. Most of us think about data and music about marketing -- which she has done well to attract more than 175,000 fans on a variety of platforms. Shelita also uses behavioral data, with fan permission, to design tracks to appeal to targeted e...

Storm Gloor has been tracking how songs succeed since he was a young teen . . . and now explores anything from how music cities can succeed and how one-hit wonders thrive (or don't). We enjoyed talking about how cities create and sustain music scenes with help from civic organizations, which may come from government or from the community. We discussed Richard Florida's revised creative economy stu...

Rehan Choudhry joined our podcast to discuss the upcoming second year of Emerge LV -- and to share his journey on how he re-melds social justice and music in this Facebook-embedded era. He walked us down his path through college, Homeland Security, Atlantic City, the Cosmopolitan, and Life is Beautiful. He then shared the challenges and importance of reconnecting social justice and heartfelt artis...

Paul Bradley joined the podcast to talk about his adventures creating the tour management software system, Eventric. He shared how he started in band management and tour operations, along with being a drummer on tour, and created databases on a Compaq computer on Filemaker software. After years of developing databases and sharing them with other tours, he began to sell databases as a system and cr...

In this week's podcast, we enjoy Laura Escudé taking us on a tour of live performance music . . . and touring . . . and breaking negative beliefs about performance and ability through tech tools. She mixes Ableton Live, her own violin skills, tools like the Unreal game engine, and major tours and artists. She looks at how beliefs and technology change change the sense of what is possible and what...

This brief episode features our host and Center director, Gigi Johnson, sharing an invitation to join us in person at UCLA (while supplies last) or via Zoom online for our May 15 Conference on Amplifying Music in Our Los Angeles. Gigi shares the questions that other Music Cities are asking -- how to amplify local music scenes in the face of (a) gentrification and (b) this streaming era. ...

In this week's podcast, Amadea Choplin, the COO from Pex, takes us down the online music data rabbit hole. She shares how official music distribution is just the beginning of the adventures of distributed songs, and how on average 99% of top artists' music use has moved beyond the original uploaded accounts to be reloaded into other spaces and purposes across the viral web. Pex tracks copies of fr...

Marivi is connecting digital marketing to a more traditional, low-tech, multilingual art form. She shares practical ideas for building local audience while learning from other cities and building tourism tools for our local opera scene. She also shares ways to work with cultural and lifestyle influencers with opera and ways to engage with multiple audiences in this increasingly digital age. Guest:...

Seth Schachner returned to discuss the changes afoot in music and tech deal-making. Enjoy this continuing conversation of how deals are being made between artists and new technologies, and how artists and managers can think about connecting with new technologies in their marketing. Guest: Seth Schachner, Managing Director of Strat Americas Seth Schachner is Managing Director of Strat Americas...

Iris Wu and Pei-Lun Hsieh from Ambidio were inspired to understand and create new ways for creative artists to design immersive sound for "regular" playback on computers, laptops, and phones. In this podcast, they share their journey in experimenting, connecting with Skywalker sound, and getting to their current jumping off point in connecting a new dimension of creative sound with video, music, a...

Jay LeBoeuf created Real Industry when he was guest lecturing and realized that his students did not really see what jobs and careers were out there in music in technology. After four years of growth, Real Industry now brings together 40 colleges and universities, mentors from around music and technology, and brands and sponsors to mission-driven challenges that change lives. Guest: Jay LeBoeuf, F...

Ross Gardiner is co-launching the Los Angeles Nightlife Alliance, convening a group to bring together a love of LA's nightlife, government savvy, and community organizing. He shares his stories of how efforts in Berlin, Amsterdam, and London led to efforts in New York, which has led to this grassroots effort growing for the past year in Los Angeles. Guest: Ross Gardiner, Co-Founder, LA Nightlife A...

Seth Schachner shared a great history of how he has been able to be a long-time deal guy, helping with diverse deals in changing industries. He is now working across sectors to bring together deals across virtual reality, social music, spatial audio, and other arenas with skills he gained working at AOL, Microsoft, Sony, and Universal. Join us to think about early digital music deals and how they...