SXSW 2023 Recap: Key takeaways from the top Music and Tech gathering
300,000 entrepreneurs, creators, and more converged in Austin, TX, this month for SXSW 2023, in the event’s second edition since returning from the pandemic shutdown and the 36th annual edition overall.
By David Benjamin De Cristofaro
In a massive turnout, the worlds of music and tech collided in unparalleled fashion. The record industry, reps from major talent agencies, streaming companies, and publications in music helped to fill out panel spots where they were joined by others from a number of tech-based companies. Live music industry presence was thinner, though it was headlined by presence on some panels featuring business leaders from AEG highlighting their industry lead in XR integrations and activations with their festivals, like Coachella.
While the event still features its signature showcases for up-and-coming acts and artists, SXSW’s music festival roots are now far surpassed and eclipsed by its interwoven major brands and sponsors, as well as focus on tech, TV and film, and the business of music and multimedia. The Austin Convention Center acts as a hub, but the event extends throughout nearby hotels, and sprawls outward, integrated into the surrounding downtown community and rentable building spaces, bars, clubs, and venues.
The closest thing in terms of event size and similarity would be NAMM, but the way the event is fully extended into the surrounding area is wholly different and unique.
Here is a look at what stood out among the week’s highlights
The Future of Music Was Hidden In Plain View
When I arrived at the convention center, the buzz and energy was tangible inside as well as in the nearby Fairmont Austin, in which additional panel programming was taking place. While it became very clear that the event schedule was overloaded and jam-packed, there were some standouts topically that I found to be of note.
The most visible brand to emerge this year, marrying music and tech, was Lablecoin. The next big direct-to-fan tool for artists, the platform gives fans greater opportunity to directly invest in supporting songs and artists they believe in. From sponsoring the SXSW Music lanyards to their solid track of programming at their venue stage and mixers, the company and its CEO Mark Miller were a big part of this year’s event, offering an actionable artist revenue solution.
One of the things that really stood out across the panels was the role that XR and Web3 are playing in facets of the music industry right now. While many referenced current or recent projects as opposed to future ideation, it was encouraging to see such widespread programming dedicated to these topics.
Given how long I’ve pointed to AR as the most consumer-friendly and integrative potential tech with market trajectory, due in no small part to the smart screen devices we hold in our hands and carry with us everywhere, it was exciting to see and hear how the hardware development is allowing more focus on building interaction, participatory storytelling, and immersive experiences.
AR hardware has officially crossed the tipping point where it’s caught up to the applications it’s long been envisioned for. It will play a key role as a “transitionary technology that will allow people to move between the digital and physical worlds really seamlessly,” per Optiv’s John Tsangaris. Pokemon Go parent company Niantic continued its steady and stellar presence among top music tech conferences, building an AR Garden in a nearby building courtyard park. One of the features they showcased was their NBA All-World AR game, in which you can compete against NBA players in your own community. Several years ago, I pitched an AR version of Rock Band to the VP of Creative for Harmonix, and it’s not hard to picture this being a reality in which you can face off against famous musicians in AR jam sessions.
A great example of how a major act in music has been brought out into real life environments by way of AR, was highlighted by Nexus Studios’ Pablo Colapinto during an ‘Animation’s New Horizon: The Real-Time Revolution’ panel. He shared a project for Google where the streets of New York and London were transformed into augmented reality stages for performances by Skinny Ape from the band Gorillaz.
Unstable and already antiquated investments like Crypto and NFT’s were, refreshingly, not topics of focus in conversation for the most part. Unfortunately, viable solution tech like blockchain wasn’t either. AI was brought up frequently though, as conference panels often do, forecasting the tech’s trajectory and applications were more brought up by those asking in Q&A than by the panelists. Even more so at SXSW than any other conferences, in that its attendance is the biggest participatory smart-audiences in the world.
“The tech world just moves on very quickly to the next big thing,” said Wikipedia editor Molly White during her keynote, perhaps also revealing an insight into the following of fleeting and transient trend topics and lack in forward vision in panel conversations. “I think the mythmaking and hype cycles that society goes through are not good.”
An eye to tech’s historical timeline and its intersections with consumer culture when things become accessible and affordable to all, offer insights as to what tech to have an eye for at these expos. More slow-but-high-fidelity tech to consumers are the ones for brands to focus on if they want to align with shares of markets in that consumer culture for sustained business and growth.
Fortunately, SXSW offered plenty of forward-focused topics in their program schedule, and an expansive Creative Industries Expo and broad XR Experience offering as well.
Meanwhile, common echo chamber topics aside, more current points of interest such as ticketing and the emergence of ChatGPT were not talked about or prevalent in that the panels are voted on in advance.
Something For Everybody, But With Tech as a Central Focus
There is so much to see and do that the schedule is overflowing. Scout that schedule as well as any artists on the showcases ahead of time to prioritize and maximize your time.
One obstacle with this year’s programming was the triple-to-quadruple scheduling of relative topics across time blocks, where the audience to one track would be present at the other several save for their being scheduled at the same time. Given the emergence of SXSW’s conference as the preeminent destination event for music and tech globally, it’s surpassed the music festival as the primary draw. To that end, it could be to their benefit to spread some of those tracks and industry meetups and mixers out to the latter half of the week and/or a time-block or two over into the early evenings to space those relative tracks out a bit more and create alternate gathering spaces for that community free from the volume of nearby showcases.
One can see though how the topics are becoming more centric to the actual progression of the tech history timeline and not that year’s echo chamber buzz topic.
Top Music Business Execs Aren’t Knowledgeable in Tech
One of the things that came up the most on panels in conferences since returning from the pandemic, is when they cover their designated topics, it’s not uncommon to hear representatives from major household name companies in music be able to reference aspects of their job responsibilities and workflow, or projects they’ve worked on.
Learning on the job seems to be the norm in terms of how tech is reactively being adapted into their lexicon and business models, which needless to say is much different than being professionally educated or having a research-oriented background as to tech history in consumer culture, and applications in music and its future.
The end result is that tech and the job roles created for it with companies can be more or less situational based on whether the companies have been early or slow adapters. Either way, tech roles in major music companies appear to have mostly only grown down to an entry level in tech-based brands like Spotify. Tech develops quickly, and you don’t want your business to be one that is left playing catch-up.
Record labels, for example, underwent economic disruption from Napster file sharing to iTunes unbundling model for song monetization, losing the record sales revenues they’d repackaged over a handful of formats for piles of money, while hemorrhaging money fighting against the future that had become present in courtrooms. Eventually mergers, acquisitions, and the shrinking of major labels from six back to three required them to be early adapters of tech to create new and future monetization opportunities for labels and artists to reconstruct and rebuild those revenue streams over the past 20 years. Aside from some virtual concerts and metaverse app experiences at music festivals, leading businesses in the live industry of music have been slow adapters of tech, as aside from the COVID shutdown they haven’t experienced the level of disruption or innovation-for-survival that labels did yet.
A common thread among panels at music conferences I’ve been a part of has been a senior member of a corporate staff acknowledging during Q&A’s that they don’t possess a knowledge of current tech or Web3 topics, but that have teams or departments within the company that do.
One VP of a major talent agency volunteered as much, while also pointing out that hip hop and EDM artists are embracing Web3 solutions while many of the top tier artists he deals with aren’t interested and don’t even want to hear about it.
This has been a pattern and industry insight common among conference events in music. Fortunately, SXSW promises through the many members of the next generation of music business and tech professionals, as was evident in their Q&A’s, that will change over time.
David Benjamin De Cristofaro is a recent grad ‘available-for-hire’ who achieved National success as an award-winning student of Music Business, Tech, Marketing and Economics with The University of The Arts and Berklee College of Music. While in school, he met with members of Congress in advocacy with The Recording Academy, worked with some of the largest artists, tours, and festivals in Music, and on creative experience projects and solutions for NARAS, the Capitol Records Innovation Center, Fender, Bose, MusiCares, Spotify, and Republic Records. He has served as an international speaker at universities and conferences. He spent the pandemic writing journalism pieces on immersive and fan experience ecosystems and researching emerging ticket models + solutions, while also contributing to USA Today SMG.
