Computing fair invites in the music industry (Feature)

Feb 24, 2010, 5:08 GMT

Hanover, Germany - In an unlikely yin-yang tie-up that may arrest a decline in Germany's CeBIT trade fair, organizers have this year offered the music industry a bridgehead into the cerebral world of software.

In terms of Chinese philosophy, CeBIT, held every March in the German city of Hanover, is yin, in the sense of shy and insubstantial.

Passionless programmers design software and components which are not much for fair visitors to look at: just discs and dull-looking metallic cubes. The products are technically ingenious, but hard to love.

Music impresarios are usually the opposite: loud, glitzy and assertive, just like many of the heavily amplified rock bands they are trying to lift into fame. Music is the most emotional of arts. In a word: yang, the other side of the Chinese dichotomy.

The trade fair's bold move has been to open a new section this year, CeBIT Sounds, where entrepreneurs from these yin and yang worlds can bond and explore mutual business opportunities.

Stefan Milchalk, director of the German Music Industry Federation BVMI, recently explained why music people, who have traditionally associated the word 'digital' with piracy and other evils, now want to be one step ahead of the play in digital entertainment.

'The cleverest technology is not much use unless you have the content to put on it,' he said.

'At the same time, films, books and music need new channels to reach consumers. CeBIT Sounds is a brilliant way to get music as content into one of the world's biggest technology fairs.'

BVMI is one of the sponsors of the new venture, which will include a small sound stage for performances by bands emerging from obscurity and panel discussions in one of the fairground's hangar-sized pavilions.

The music industry is finally getting comfortable with the idea that mobile phone companies and web platforms such as MySpace matter more to their future than High Street record shops.

A global entertainment and media report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has reported digital sales reached 20 per cent of music industry turnover in 2008.

The recent demise of Popkomm, a Berlin-based music industry trade fair, was hailed as a godsend by the CeBIT team, who were looking for a way to put pep back into their declining event. Now, they hope they can attract some of the interest from Popkomm, where music managers could go to sign up record companies for new acts.

Whether CeBIT Sounds, which has a solidly German focus, will catch the next wave is not yet certain.

Most of the European music business gathers every January in Cannes, France for a trade fair, Midem, and a congress, Midemnet, which has been successfully doing for a decade at international level what CeBIT Sounds wants to achieve now.

Some blame CeBIT's decline on the success of other fairs, such as the Consumer Electronics Show every January in Las Vegas and Berlin's IFA fair every August, which conjure up warm, yang feelings around home entertainment and appliances.

Others say it is a sign that the digital industry is maturing, with fewer new inventions and more attention to refining ideas that came out 10 or 15 years ago. Back in 2001, CeBIT had 8,093 exhibitors.

Last year, exhibitor numbers sagged 25 per cent and public attendance slipped one fifth to 400,000, but at 4,157, the exhibitor numbers this time round are only down 3 per cent from 4,292 a year ago.

Some past stay-aways, including AMD, Ericsson and Motorola, are even coming back.

But top consumer brands no longer exhibit at CeBIT, which now aims to attract computing department managers, merchants and business executives rather than the general public.

CeBIT remains a key world venue for announcing new products such as laptop and netbook computers.

Fairground chief Ernst Raue said many exhibitors would also be spelling out how their products can take advantage of the new high- speed mobile phone standard LTE (Long Term Evolution).

Spanish companies will be exhibiting as 'guests of honour' at this year's CeBIT, prompting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to help Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel inaugurate the fair late on March 1 in Hanover.