Bob Kohn, the founder of eMusic (which he has since sold) hosted this session, in which he shamelessly plugged his new enterprise, RoyaltyShare.com. This is a site that deals with splitting the revenue from performances, digital sales and the licensing of music between the parties with an interest in the work. They’re aimed mainly at [...]

Nick Bailey (Shore Fire Media) and Kandia Crazy Horse (Bluegum journalist) dropped a short intro before opening up to questions – top tips for artists starting out were to consider getting a booking agent before anything else and play gigs as much as possible (but remember to tour smart!), and to realise that the press [...]

This was a great panel: Brad King of Northern Kentucky University kept a tight leash on some big names from web innovators Bebo (Angel Gambino), Last.fm (Matt Ogle), Sonicbids (Panos Panay – who looks like Roger Federer, btw), iLike (Ali Partovi), and Myspace Records (Jon Pikus).
The consensus from this panel was that ubiquity is a [...]

Panel: Martin Atkins (Public Image drummer/Invisible Records), Eddie Spaghetti (The Supersuckers) – Martin Atkins took quick and charismatic control of this session. His advice to bands comes from 25 years in all aspects of the music industry. He advocated the idea that before anything else, a band planning a tour should form a coherent strategy, [...]

Austin proper doesn’t seem to extend further than 40 blocks square on the north side of Ladybird Lake, but it’s packed with venues – 75 on the official programme and more doing their own thing on the fringe of the event. Despite this seeming superfluity of stages, even the delegates who’ve got official SXSW [...]

Two things particularly struck me about arriving in Texas for my first SXSW – the first was the extra-wide wheelchairs waiting at the airport to ferry the extra wide Texans through the airport, and the second is the huge milling crowd of musicians with regrettable haircuts, skinny jeans and a stack of guitars on their [...]