My MIDEM this year didn’t start until Sunday evening, as other commitments made an earlier arrival not possible. However, Easyjet Flight # 3103 from Stansted duly deposited me at Nice airport mid afternoon and - courtesy of the Nice/Cannes express bus - I had my delegate registration ID round my neck, and was on the British Music @ MIDEM stand within a couple of hours. Although the ‘exhibition day’ was nearly over, there was still plenty of activity and bustling evidence of the increased number of UK delegates that we had at this year’s MIDEM.
Fast forward to Monday morning, and my first meeting of a busy day; I was starting off gently with my old friend Sat Bisla; ubiquitous organiser of Music conferences & events around the world and head honcho of the MUSEXPO organisation. Unfortunately, we had arranged an early breakfast at the famous Café Roma, opposite Le Palais. Unbeknown to us (and from what I learned through the week many other delegates), this MIDEM landmark was ‘ferme’ and being refurbished – how could they? So on a rainy Monday morning, I was hanging around a demolished building site on the Croisette, along with a number of other similarly hapless ‘MIDEMers’ looking out from under my umbrella! A quick phone call and I was safely relocated in the warmth of an adjoining café with Sat, drying off and desperately trying to attract the attention of an overworked waiter – that café must have tripled its turnover or more for the week by virtue of the short-sighted decision of the owners of Café Roma….closing in MIDEM week, not the brightest business decision.
In the interests of ‘blog brevity’, I won’t bore you with the full schedule of events and meetings that I had during the next couple of days; maybe just a few of the highlights. One of those was certainly the Monday might British Music concert featuring amongst others Newton Faulkner, Chipmunk , Davy Knowles & The Back Door Slam and The Yeah You’s. My personal opinion? Chipmunk is hopefully a UK artist that can build an international career with his tight punchy songs, although his in-between song chat might need some editing.……Morrissey he ain’t. However, at age 19 and at the beginning of his stage career, this is a very minor quibble. Davy Jones obviously has the whole Rory Gallagher catalogue in his record (i-Pod?) collection and I thought that his short 20 minute set went down really well. Previous artists performing at the British Music night have included Amy Winehouse, Jamie Cullum, Elbow & the great Richard Hawley…so the track record is good hopefully for both the above and all the others who appeared. Thanks to Caroline Reason @ CAA & Tony Moore for organising this event.
I met with the new ‘project organiser’ for Popkomm (an event that in 2009 was cancelled), and he gave a spirited speech as to their plans for 2010 - Berlin 8/10th September in a new location at the old Tempelhof airport there. Hopefully this can be reinstated on the music calendar again. A Japanese market research company cornered me for advice as to how Japanese music can be exported to the UK. Frankly, if I had any sensible answers, I would be hiring myself out at an exhorbitant fee, but hopefully a couple of things I said made some sense to them. As is traditional, the meeting ended with presentation of an elaborately wrapped gift, which was accepted graciously – although upon opening it later, I wasn’t sure if it was little bars of different flavoured soap or chocolate! Possibly the oddest meeting I had was with Sergey & Mikhail from a Russian mobile company, that initially thought that the BPI could make a deal with them to license any UK repertoire for use on I’m not sure what. Whilst fully appreciating the difficulties of Russian/English translation, I think that it’s safe to say that neither of us fully understood each other – and that’s before I attempted to illuminate them as to the byzantine complexities of new media licensing in the UK. To me Russians always look a bit worried and when I finished this meeting, nothing had happened to change that thought. Hopefully, I wasn’t completely useless!
Anyway, there are a few short thoughts from abroad. As always, met a lot of BPI members down in Cannes………and hopefully a few members-to-be. I still regard MIDEM as a (the?) major international music event for independent labels and – along with our partners at the UKTI, PPL, PRS for Music, MPA, AIM, BASCA & the Welsh Music Foundation – the BPI will continue to be an assiduous supporter.