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The internationally acclaimed Decibel Festival kick started today @ its home base of Seattle for its 2012 edition. Decibel is a long running event focused on electronic dance music, new media and visual art. Five days long Seattle will be the center of events all across town.
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Alongside all of the musical performaces, Decibel has a conference part to the program, mainly focused on new techniques regarding music production and performance, but also about other aspects of artists’ careers such as how to go about social media.
Hammarica.com attended this first social media panel featuring Rob Swope of Rockstar-digital.com, Zach Huntting of Fourthcity Records and Zach Verdin of Newhive. In this day and age, artists are not only required to have a social media presence. They are presumed to take care of it all by themselves.
Rob Swope feels that every social medium has its own specific power to it and he doesn’t believe so much in connecting all these different media with automated cross posting. According to him, each social network should be evaluated to what it is used best for, and then utilized with this specific knowledge. IE a post originating from Facebook bounced to Twitter doesn’t have too much use. A post tailored to Facebook, like a picture.. Or a post tailored to Twitter like a special shout out or retweets, or a mention have better effect.
Other than that he feels that various social media channels will soon merge into one standardized platform with profiles where there is room for each specific feed from various social media channels, like facebook, twitter, soundcloud youtube and so on.
Furthermore he noted to the website http://www.nextbigsound.com where artists are able to get a rather complete set of statistics about themselves. Where do people talk about the artist? Where do the fans come from? And so on.
Zach Huntting has mixed feelings about social media because it also hurts his business as a record label. Music is available everywhere from Soundcloud to Spotify and Youtube and it hurts sales. Even just a few years ago sales were much higher for his record label due to the ubiquitous spread of music through social platforms where the music is offered for free.
Yet every one of the panellists agreed that artists should utilize and embrace social media in all ways and find just the right format to engage with their fanbase. Should they engage as their persona? Or should they engage as themselves? Sometimes it is either of these two, or a healthy mix..
This panel was definitely useful, even for us at Hammarica.com it’s always fun to see how others treat their social media experience.
Decibel, we look forward to a great week of fun events and can’t wait to cover it all!
There is free cover for the conference part at Broadway Perfomance Hall all week. Other panellists will include legendary Roger Linn explaining about his performance instruments such as the Tempest drum machine and Chris Petti (NI) and Dave Segal *The Stranger) among many others.
Broadway Performance Hall (Will Call, dB Conference, dB Films and OPTICAL 3 and 4 : all-ages) 1625 Broadway
Connect:
http://dBFestival.com
http://facebook.com/DecibelFestival
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