Leadership Music Holds Annual Music Summit

Pictured (L-R): Jeremy Holley, Jeff Nicholas, Charles Fetterly, Jenn Downs, PJ Loughran, Andre Gaccetta. Photo: Bev Moser

Members of the music industry convened yesterday, Sept. 10, for Leadership Music’s annual Music Summit at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works. Leadership’s Executive Director Debbie Linn welcomed the seated crowd, voicing hopes that the summit would “awaken the entrepreneur in you.” The sessions, which were engaging, informative and at times dry, began with an inspirational address by The Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s President and CEO Michael Burcham.

Burcham described his humble beginnings, growing up dirt poor in Mississippi before moving to Nashville, where he dove into entrepreneurship and found unyielding success. “This is a city that oozes creativity and entrepreneurship out of its pores,” spoke Burcham. “We all have the opportunity in the city to do something profoundly different and start a business.” He emphasized this point with stories about student underdogs who worked hard to create flourishing businesses and added, “If these folks can do what they’ve done, what’s your excuse? Get busy!” Burcham also presented 10 entrepreneurship lessons he has learned, including building a network of outside of your industry and learning that failure is a part of life.

Randy Goodman of the Music City Music Council broadly discussed the Council’s purpose and the state of the music business. The council, including co-chair Mayor Karl Dean, has been promoting Nashville and working to centralize the music industry here. “Nashville as a city can become a key host for music industry events,” said Goodman. “This is an amazing city, it is an it city.” The meat of Goodman’s discussion came when he mentioned the possibility of the Grammys taking place here. After noting the success of the Grammy Nominations Concert held in Nashville last year, Goodman said, “We are now in a place to make a pitch for the Grammys to be held here.”

As the day warmed up, Mark Tindle of Musicmetric came onstage to discuss analytics across the digital landscape. “I’m an advocate of utilizing information that can be gathered in intelligence, which can help us utilize sales opportunities,” he said, before inundating the crowd with information. Interesting points included the fact that consumers are more comfortable engaging with celebrity artists (Tindle cited One Direction’s Harry Styles and his enormous social media following). Tindle also discussed trends among file sharing networks like Bit Torrent. For example, the most illegally shared artists, like Justin Timberlake, Rihanna and Bruno Mars, also receive the most digital downloads.

Next up was OpenTopic’s Christian Jorg who discussed the company’s significant growth over the past several months. ”I’m doing now what I really love doing which is being an entrepreneur,” said Jorg, who transformed the company from a shaky start-up into a successful business. The company is admittedly cool, providing users with a marketing platform to develop content initiatives. “We find relative sources, curate them, engage audiences, evaluate and measure,” said York. OpenTopic has already been employed by highly recognizable companies, ranging from Comcast to TV Guide, which used the platform to create a website dedicated to the 80s sitcom Cheers. Jorg’s speech emphasized the importance of a unique product in a highly competitive business sphere.

MusicRow founder David Ross moderated the morning’s first panel on video marketing, which included panelists Dez Dickerson, Jamin Guy, Brody Harper, Jared Scheel and Stokes Nielson. Panelists discussed video branding, where to release a video, the importance of production value and more. “Having a newspaper is not enough, you need the digital to go with it,” said Stokes. “You have to have very digestible pieces that can get the message across quickly.” Interesting points included the suggestion that emerging artists boost their careers by “collaborating with other artists who have a YouTube following” and the misconception that a bigger budget will result in a better video project. Dickerson touched on the most important aspect of video marketing, saying “at the end of the day, audience is the only metric that matters.”

The morning’s final panel on push and pull marketing was moderated by Warner Music Nashville’s Jeremy Holley and included panelists Jeff Nichols, PJ Loughran, Andre Gaccetta, Charles Fetterly and Jenn Downs. Panelists weighed the pros and cons of push and pull marketing and discussed the best ways to circulate a product. Downs advocated word of mouth and advised that products “be human, be real, be authentic.” Loughran similarly spoke about “brand evangelists,” saying “we procure something that begins to take a life of its own.” Meanwhile, Gaccetta piqued the crowd’s interest with a description of airport marketing, while Holley summed up the panelists’ advice, saying “create compelling content to attract consumers.”

Although the morning presentations included a few tech difficulties (it was difficult to see presenter images on the display screens) and some yawns, they provided participants with several valuable insights. The presentations ended with participants feasting on sandwiches and salads while the rain poured down on a warm Nashville day.

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