Held at the Hard Rock Hotel and Dalt Vila, IMS Ibiza 2015 offered an array of talks, summits and events with the aim to further grow and innovate the genre of electronic music. With annual events also in L.A. and Singapore too, this was the 8th edition of the IMS (International Music Summit) Ibiza.
20th-22nd May 2015 consisted of three-days of the most comprehensive and compelling live seminars and debates amongst the leaders of the international music community featuring Keynote Speeches, Interviews and technology master classes amongst various other activity in the day time.
The talks were interesting and reflective of an electronic music industry that is currently thriving. Kevin Watson mentioned in the IMS Business Report that the industry is now worth 6.9 billion dollars, and is up 12% on last year. To put that into some kind of context, 27 of the most sold 100 tracks in the world last year were electronic. The conference was attended by representatives from the biggest companies in music.
One of those, Clark Warner, of Beatport explained that they will be the “the home of electronic music” and have plans for their own social media platform and subscription service that will be a global network for highly engaged fans to connect to artists in a big personal way. Alexander Ljung of Soundcloud said, “we have a simple arc, which is remarkably straightforward; by building the best tools for artists, creating ways of building a large audience and then creating ways of monetizing that audience.” Nick Matthews, an agent at Coda Agency argued that you can’t buy long term success in electronic music, “if you’re good, and people think you’re good, you’ll succeed. If you’re crap and buy a load of facebook artist likes, you wont succeed for very long.”
On an Ibiza tip, in The Great IMS Ibiza Debate, Simon Dunmore of Defected said, “more and more people are coming to the island, competition for club nights is healthy, and San Antonio provides a great entry point for those who cannot afford Ushuaia and Space every night.” Speaking of San Antonio, Christian Anadon of Café Mambo was high on what the likes of twitter and facebook can do to improve presence, “thanks to social media, we went from 250 people watching the sunset to 25,000.”
With the daytime talks over, it was time for the music to do the talking in the evening at the The IMS Grand Finale Festival on Thursday and Friday night which was held in the unique Dalt Vila location: A UNESCO World Heritage Site. Dalt Vila looked beautiful and rocked to the sounds of Luciano, Pete Tong, Solomun and Sven Vath on the Thursday and Rudimental and MK on the Friday.
IMS Ibiza 2015 was an action packed and few days which signalled the start of the 2015 Ibiza season, which, going by the numbers attending IMS will be a busy and successful summer for the island.
Thanks to Mark Playle for attending and providing info for Uneek Ibiza