ROLI: Modern Music Industry

Another event that I attended recently was at ROLI. If you don’t know ROLI, they are the creators of the Seaboard keyboard controller that’s had loads of media attention over the last year or so. I was lucky enough to see the device in an early stage and I’ve been following its development over the last two years very keenly.

But that’s not all that ROLI do. They’ve also set up a number of regular events for people involved in the music industry, and not just hardware, but a very wide range or sectors within the industry as a whole. The event is called “The Modern Music Industry”, and it brings people from different backgrounds together to talk about how they see the industry changing and developing.

I was lucky enough to be at, and speak at the first of these events, late last year. You can imagine what my agenda was, basically promoting all things mobile of course, but from my perspective it’s really interesting to hear other people’s views as well, and the latest event was a case in point.

The latest Modern Music Industry event had speakers from Goldsmiths and Music Tech Fest. Both of whom were of real interest to me. The speaker from Goldsmiths talked about the work that they do there and also about NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), a conference coming to Goldsmiths in late June this year. Rebecca has also worked with Smule and has a good understanding of the mobile world. Sadly I wasn’t able to stay for the Music Tech Fest talk, but as I’ve been at their events two years running and expect to be there again this year I wasn’t too troubled.

The main point is that this kind of event is excellent for bringing together people from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds within the music industry to talk about what’s happening and how things can change. It’s a great atmosphere for collaboration and for finding out what other people are up to, and it’s great that ROLI host these events.

I hope that they continue to do so.