The Mondo.NYC festival began on October 10 at the Williamsburg Hotel in Brooklyn. Although it calls itself a festival, Mondo is much more.
The event combines a music and technology business conference with a showcase festival. A lot of concerts are integrated, but there are also executives from the music industry in attendance. By going through the speaker list and schedule, you can see even what fantastic projects, start-ups and technologies are currently out there. You also get a glimpse into parallel organizations that have formed in the US. One example is the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), which secured around $16.25 billion to keep events going during the Corona Pandemic.
KICK OFF PARTY @ WILLIAMSBURG HOTEL
What to See at Mondo
Mondo also showcases some start-up ideas that sound quirky at first but turned into success stories. For example: Indify. Indify was launched in 2015 as an artist discovery platform and tool for talent scouts in the music industry. Its business is based on a proprietary discovery algorithm that identifies artists who will become breakout stars. It sounds crazy, but it works.
Another success story is Trac. In the past, an artist needed a distributor for their music. Today everything is digital, and distributors have been replaced by digital service providers (DSPs). Through Trac, an artist can release their music on all the major DSPs like Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube. That way artists can spend more time making music than distributing it.
Yet another example is the Create Music Group, an independent music distribution and publishing company. They started in 2015 by collecting unclaimed revenue for EDM artists on YouTube. As of January 2019, the company was already monetizing about 9 billion streams per month. Sometimes you just have to recognize gaps in the market.
Finally, we have Splice, which is the highest-quality, royalty-free sample library in the music industry. Artists get access to millions of sounds created by top artists, labels and sound designers – all available at the touch of a button. This makes it easy for artists in genres like electronic music, hip hop and R&B where samples are often the basis of a track.
The list of what to see at Mondo.NYC could go on and on, as there are more than 50 panel discussions and conversations with over 200 leading executives and entrepreneurs in music, art, media and technology on the program. We’ll introduce you to more participants in the coming days.
Accompanying the conference are more than 40 live artist showcases around NYC at Arlene’s Grocery, Berlin, Bowery Electric, Drom, the Sultan Room and online via Mondo’s YouTube channel.
After the kick-off party, we headed to see the Violent Femmes at City Winery. You may know this legendary band from their hit “Blister in the Sun”.
Next up is an interview with one of the winners of SIXT’s contest for a performance at Mondo.NYC: DJ WAASII. We’ll follow them from their arrival at an NYC SIXT station to the gig. Stay tuned!
