Hip Hop music and culture have been a cornerstone for youth expression and movements for years now. From Rhode Island to Russia, from Tel Aviv to Texas, Hip Hop has become the voice of youth in so many ways, be it filled with raw revolutionary fervor or pristine commercial appeal.

But youth haven’t always been included in what has become a necessary tool for artists growing and cultivating their own careers, as well as a tool for learning and teaching: the music conference. Oakland’s own California Music Industry Summit is about to change all of that, with the inaugural Youth Hip Hop Battle, featured at this years’ edition of the CMIS on Saturday, June 15. This is a chance for young people age 14-17 in high school to hone and display their greatest skills in Hip Hop music for all attendees of the 2013 California Music Industry Summit to see. These youth will be able to submit the best of their music on http://tramaientertainment.com/Registration. From those submissions, 10 young artists will be chosen to battle for 1 minute and 30 seconds and put on display their most top notch lyrics, wordplay and rhyme skills. All youth that submit are automatically registered for free all access badges to attend the music conference on the closing day of the conference.

CMIS strives to be a positive and inclusive voice in the community through music and education, and teaching people about the ins and outs of the continuously evolving music industry and music business is a paramount responsibility that CMIS takes very seriously. With the introduction of the new Youth Hip Hop Battle, CMIS will continue to that tradition by encouraging youth to be as creative as they can through the music, the message and the culture of Hip Hop.

This will be an amazing chance for youth in our community to use their creativity and their minds to make a positive impact through music. And it will also be a great chance for adults that want to support those youths to do just that. All interested youth only need to step up to the mic and to the challenge! If you’re a young person ages 14-17, visit http://tramaientertainment.com/Registration by June 3 for your chance at Hip Hop excellence!

No matter how far technology takes music away from it’s analog roots, one thing that seems to be irreplaceable is the live music show. And attendance at live music events is as big as it has ever been, with companies like LiveNation, TicketFly and StubHub taking the lead in streamlining the ticketing experience, large scale festivals like Coachella, Banaroo, Outside the Lands, Pitchfork, Lollapalooza, SXSW and many more making the festival experience into something to be cherished for years to come, and local venues around the country experiencing a resurgence in live music events. And one of the latest ventures to try taking the live music experience directly to the people is WeWantShows.com.

 A new project created by Matt Sparks, Musician, Developer and Designer from Lexington, KY, WeWantShows.com allows artists, musicians and band that want to communicate about and give information on their shows the chance to go on the open source website and choose from a total of over 160 cities and do exactly that. One of the most interesting and somewhat risky parts is that participants do not have to create an account or log into the site at all to be able to share or receive information, which is supposed to allow for easier use of the site. With a tag line of “Helping Bands find & trade shows”, this could be a new way for professional musicians to communicate with each other, network and share information about the most important way they make a living: the live show.

WeWantShows.com seems to be the latest in a long line of sites that is helping to make music much more D.I.Y. and open source, much like websites like SoundCloud and Bandcamp allow artists to sell and distribute their music on their own. Could it be possible that We Want Shows can potentially be the SoundCloud or Bandcamp of the live show? It’s still very early to tell, but if the company is able to build a substantial foundation of capital and buzz among artists, there’s not telling what may be able to happen.

It’s no secret that Spotify is the premiere social music platform throughout the world. True, it has direct and indirect competition from many outlets, but for all the company has done to create a certain mystique and folklore about itself, as well as aligning itself with the world’s premiere social network, Spotify is the social music tool that everyone is still talking about. And because of that, Spotify’s power and influence continues to grow exponentially.

Reported last week, Spotify has acquired Tunigo, a music discovery application that searches Spotify’s library and playlists. Tunigo will apparently be adding news, new releases, and an advanced music player to Spotify’s current platform. Tunigo also has a Spotify iPhone app and reportedly also already raised a total of $3 million in funding.

So what does this all mean? Well, mainly, it means that the music discovery has officially been crowned the new battleground in the industry. It used to be music labels that were slugging it out trying to gain the biggest slice of the pie. But things shifted away from labels a long time ago. Now, the fight is over who can provide the most convenience, the greatest experience, and the most value to music lovers. The companies involved in this new music battle royal include Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, iTunes, Slacker, Shazam, and more companies that we’re probably yet to even hear of.

But with the purchase of Tunigo, Spotify has once again given itself a distinct advantage that will give the company the upper hand over it’s competitors, at least for the time being. This new age battle for music supremacy is far from over and will definitely get more interesting as time passes.

Eventbrite, known now as a major outlet for self-service ticketing, has raised $60 million in funding led by efforts from Tiger Capital Management and T. Rowe Price. The company’s total funding is now $140 million. This follows very rapid growth by Eventbrite, with a total of $1.5 billion in gross sales of tickets.

Why is this important? Mainly for two reasons:

1.     Eventbrite’s success is merely a drop in the bucket compared to Ticketmaster, but it’s success has but the ticketing behemoth on notice that it may have some direct and substantial competition in the near future.

2.     The company has sold over 100 million tickets in 179 countries, making for very rapid growth in the last few months alone.

In terms of actual events, Eventbrite gives creators the opportunity to create and manage many different kinds of events, from conferences and sports to performing arts and fundraising events. But of course, in this new sharing economy, this is very important to the D.I.Y. music artist of the 21^st century. We can be sure that from the 100 million tickets sold, a good majority of them have probably been to independent concerts and music festivals.

And beyond just that, people who attend these live events, especially events that a music and entertainment centered, are looking more and more to share these events with their friends, family, colleagues, co-workers and anyone else that’s important to their life. The fact that a person or group of people can actually create an event, set a price for it, manage it and take it their own hands to make it successful feeds right into being able to share that event and its success with others. Moreover, a company like Eventbrite that gives supporters the chance to actually create and manage events gives an almost direct contrast to Ticketmaster, which merely tells customers how to purchase tickets and where they can use them.

As important as Eventbrite has become to independent music and artists, it will likely only continue to grow and thrive. It will be interesting to see where it goes from these current successes.

The diversification of the music industry continues every day, with new ways to listen to and discover new music and new artists, as well as more ways for artists to let fans find their music and get money from doing so.

“Bands – The Game”, an app created by Berlin, Germany based startup New Tracks, is one such app. Apparently looking to help level the playing field even more between independent and major musicians, Bands looks to deliver on the promise of helping artists be able to see revenue from the sales of music tracks and virtual goods, that revenue then being split with the artists’ labels.

In an interview with Dotted Music, NewTracks founder David Brock talked about the specifics of the game and what it entails for bands: “The gameplay itself consists of mixing in-game skills like guitar solo, bass solo or drums to match the crowd behavior. We are not trying to compete with Rockstar’s “Guitar Hero”. We want to do something different with music.”

Some of the features of “Bands” include the following: a live chart of top performing bands among friends and the gaming community, artists being able to upload their own songs for inclusion in the “Bands” roster, where their success can be tracked through the live in-game charts, and players of “Bands” being able to track progress of fellow players within the game.

“Bands – The Game” looks like it could potentially be a new tool for independent musicians to find another way to make money in an industry that is changing its business model daily. With uncertainty looming large in music today, indie artists must find new ways to keep their careers alive. Maybe new apps like “Bands” can help in doing that.

For the past few years, Bandcamp has been known as the site where independent artists can use the direct-to-fan music sales model to find their own lane towards music success. With the ability to distribute and sell their music in basically any way they please, by the album or by the track, artists are finding new avenues to turn potential fans into believers, and Bandcamp had become an integral element of the new sharing economy in music.

And now, Bandcamp is redesigning and redefining itself as a place not only known for artists to connect with directly with their fans through creatively distributing their music, but also as a tool of music discovery. The company had already tried to do so last year with its web page app called Discoverinator, later changed to Bandcamp Discover. But in a second attempt, Bandcamp has redesigned its entire home page with new tools specifically for the purpose of music discovery. The centerpiece of this new venture is the Bandcamp Weekly show, where host Andrew Jervis, formerly from Ubiquity Records, will reportedly focus on music “exclusives, previews, recent faves, classics, and obscurities from around the world”.

With music discovery now being the wave of the present and the future, Bandcamp seems to be positioning itself to be able to compete with rival music discovery outlets like Spotify, Rhapsody and iTunes. The main difference, however, is that Bandcamp already has a vested interest and a foundation in the new millennium independent artist, which truthfully could be a hindrance or a distinguishing quality. But at least Bandcamp as a company is savvy enough to realize that they had better jump on the music discover train now before they get left in the dust with so many other similar companies that came before them and have since fallen from grace.

Buckle up and be ready: the new music discovery-driven Bandcamp is well on its way!

The 2013 California Music Industry Summit is officially little more than two months away, and the excitement and anticipation is building for this years’ artist features, keynote speakers, and so much more.

But some of the most important parts of the Summit is the seminars and panels and workshops. This is where CMIS participants can gain some of the most valuable and informative tips on some of the most important topics in the music industry. The ability to get good information that will help a career is more important than ever for artists and musicians.
Here are just some of the topics that CMIS participants can expect to be part of at this year’s Summit:

-Building A Team For Success: (PR, Artist Manager, Lawyer, etc)

-Beyond The Music: The Decision Makers

-Getting Noticed Online Part 1 – Low Cost Ways To Increase Your Online Presence

-New Technology and Music

-The Evolution of European Sounds and Dance Beats in R&B and Hip Hop

The team at TraMaí Entertainment and California Music Industry Summit are confident that these and other panels and workshops will be of the greatest benefit to all attendees looking to start or continue to make their mark in the music world.

Crowd funding, or the practice of using an Internet-based platform to gain funds for a creative project, has officially gone mainstream. In 2012 no one could escape the seemingly endless stream of media stories of artists, especially musicians and performers, that used several platforms to attain much-needed funding for their creative projects.

The most famous of these artists is Amanda Palmer. She used the platform Kickstarter to raise over $1 million dollars independently to help fund her musical ventures. Tagged as the it girl, media darling, poster child and model case study of what independent artists should do to gain success on their own without having to compromise their art for corporate interests, Palmer has been reported on from CNN to The New York Times. She even recently gave an exclusive TED talk entitled “The Art of Asking”, in which she gives a personal account of how she has used her fans as a prime source assistance to help fuel and finance her career as an independent music artist.

From the many websites that are now available online (Kickstarter, Pledge Music, Indiegogo, RocketHub, Indaba Music) coupled with the success of Palmer and other artists success using said tools, it’s easy for an artist at the independent level to get a bit gassed up about the potential of crowd funding and what amount of work is truly required of an artist that may go this route to fund their next big creative project, be it an album, tour, merchandise, studio time, video footage, or all of the above. But it’s also important to remember some of the following tips should an artist decide to delve into the new crowd funding phenomenon.

Have a strategy and know what you want to accomplish- Simply going onto Kickstarter and asking for money won’t get it done. Know what you want to get funded from the outset: T-shirts? Studio time? Album artwork? None of it is cheap. Have something tangible that you want to attain.

Do your best to have something to give that people actually want –It’s already common knowledge that music fans in this day and age want (and many times deserve) more from their favorite artists. Ranging from exclusive online content to dinner with the artist, knowing how to give fans what they want and showing appreciation for their support is all the more crucial in crowd funding.

Find and learn the crowd funding tool that best suits your needs…then own it – Not all crowd funding sites are made equal. You can do certain things on Kickstarter that you can’t do on Pledge Music, and so on. Once you’ve identified which platform is best for you, become a master at it and learn all the ins, outs, ups, downs and quirks until other artists are coming to you for advice.

The thing is: there’s still a lot about the practice of crowd funding that we don’t know. But with all of the success that has been garnered from it in the past two years, clearly it has already become a vital and nearly irreplaceable element of the music and arts-centered industries. Stay tuned for further developments.

Music and social media are now forever linked. With so many outlets for artists and fans to become more and more engaged with each other through both mainstream and niche social media outlets of all kinds, there can be no doubt that music has and will become more and more social and sharable that it has been in the past.

Artists are able to post and share music, videos and other content to their fans in a matter of seconds on YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and a ton of other outlets. Fans are fast becoming the critics, journalists and bloggers of the current day by being able to comment on and share this music in real-time. So music is something that more and more cannot be confined and conformed the way it has been in the past.

2013 promises to be another year in which music and social media continue to converge and trends continue to emerge. A great recent article that puts this fact into perspective is from Music Think Tank entitled “4 Emerging Trends In Social Media and How They’ll Impact the Music Industry”.

The article details four of the biggest trends that will have an effect on music this year and beyond and specifically discusses issues including  ‘the Internet of Things’ (referring to the connection between physical products and the Internet), increases in mobile adoption, multi-channel engagement and how social media outlets are becoming more and more social and video-based. Here is a link:

4 Emerging Trends In Social Media and How They’ll Impact the Music Industry

More trends in social media for musicians and artists include using free social media listening tools to their best advantage. These tools include Google Alerts, HootSuite and TweetDeck, Social Mention and Topsy. Furthermore, fan engagement tool Adva Mobile relaunched last week with a newly redesigned site and, where mobile sites are HTML5 based and viewable on any device and can be wrapped and distributed as native apps for iOS and Android via iTunes and Google Play.

Also, artists at all levels will more than likely continue to create their own music apps for the purposes of fan engagement. On Hypebot.com, there is another good article on the potential of how artists can do so:

The Potential of Product-based Artist Apps

The great thing about so many of these apps and trends is that there is so much information out there about them, but that also can be a hindrance. So it will be increasingly important for artists, especially and those that are going the independent route, to focus on what they hope to achieve when using and building these tools, as well as how each will be of the most benefit to them.

This year’s California Music Industry Summit is a little over two months away. More artists and participants are registering, ensuring that the 2013 Summit will be bigger, better and even more informative than ever.

One of the biggest aspects of CMIS is the speakers, who always being a wealth of experience, knowledge, education and expertise to the Summit and give attendees a great incentive to support one of California’s fastest growing music conferences. And this year, there will be speakers from a diverse array of music industry areas. Here are just some of the speakers that have been confirmed for June 13-15, 2013:

Anita Wilson-Pringle
COO & President of International Licensing and Marketing at CM3

Wilson-Pringle has worked with other prestigious marketing firms such as Strong Arm Entertainment, where she worked on and supervised projects such as the Sprite – OBEY YOUR THIRST campaign. She has also worked with major brands such as Coke, Shabazz Brothers Urban Wear, NetZero, Reebok, Adidas, And1, Dunk.net, Mecca and many more.

Jay Warsinske,
Founder & CEO INDIEPOWER

A 35+ year music industry executive & marketing veteran, Warsinske has helped market and break such musical acts as Dr. Dre, U2, 2Pac, Metallica, Snoop Dogg, Black Eyed Peas, Lil Wayne, Guns N Roses, Eminem, Madonna, T.I., Ramones, AC/DC, Green Day, N.W.A, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana & many more.

Mark A. Pearson-Founding Member, ARC Law Group

Pearson’s primary practice involves forming business entities, counseling on trademark & copyright issues, and drafting contracts for music, film & new media clients.  His list of interesting and eclectic clients include entertainment industry tech firms, social media outlets, online content providers, film, radio & television producers, live entertainment companies, publishers and video game developers.

Ryan Fitch-Music Producer, Saatchi & Saatchi

Fitch has spent the last 7 years integrating music into TV, radio and interactive campaigns for top global brands like Proctor & Gamble, JCPenney, Miller, General Mills and Cadbury among others.

Kenny Wardell-Executive Editor of BAMMagazine.com & BAM TV, President of SFPR (San Francisco Public Relations)

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area throughout his professional career, Kenny has worked for some of the largest media, music, sports, and special event organizations in the United States, including KCBS 740, KTVU-TV, KFOG-FM, KMEL-FM, San Francisco 49ers, National Football League, and RCA Records.

These are only a few examples of some of the amazing speakers that have been lined up for the California Music Industry Summit. And there are even more speakers that are currently being confirmed. Be sure to visit the newly designed Tramaientertainment.com for more updates on speakers in the weeks and months to come.