IMS Day 1

By Gary Smith, Ibiza

The third International Music Summit (IMS), held at Ibiza Gran Hotel May 26-28, began on a positive note with speakers identifying the dance genre’s apparent resurgence.

The event started with a fascinating insight into the popularity of dance culture presented by analyst Kevin Watson.

“What we were aiming to do was to define what this industry is about and how big it is by measuring media impact,” he said.

Watson said the video for David Guetta’s “When Love Takes Over” (Virgin), featuring Kelly Rowland, was seen by more than 50 million people, mainly through YouTube and MySpace.

“When you also take into account the millions of Facebook and Twitter fans who follow Tiesto, we are looking at acts who have considerably larger followings than a rock group such as Kings Of Leon,” he added.

Mike Pickering’s keynote speech was full of optimism. “This is a hugely exciting time in electronic music,” he said. “The young kids of today reference the great dance tunes of 10 and 20 years ago in much of the music they do and just looking at the Coachella line-up, it was Guetta, deadMau5 and 2ManyDJs headlining because they have [realized] how to put on a great show.”

Pickering, Sony Music SVP of A&R, announced the appointment of a Scottish dance music star at the revived Sony dance label Deconstruction.

“My new A&R man at Deconstruction is Calvin Harris,” Pickering said. “He told me he really wanted to do it and I think he’ll be a perfect fit.”

Global DJ superstar Erick Morillo revealed the secret behind his resurgent profile in the Big Dog DJs interview with Pete Tong, DJ and IMS founder.

“There’s been a huge change from 10 years ago in that back then, my label Subliminal had become a big operation with lots of staff, but suddenly we weren’t selling records anymore because people could download them for free,” he said. “Now people will pay for downloads, partly because it’s so easy, so running a label has become viable again although we are digital-only these days.”

At the Meet The Future presentation, Jason Bentley, music supervisor on the new “Tron” film, admitted that Disney had initially been nervous about giving the project to Daft Punk.

“I was asked to take them to meet all the top film score composers and they dutifully went to see them all and really listened to what they had to say, but at the end they said they wanted to do it themselves,” he said. “And the music has been an integral part of the film, being played on set during scenes, as opposed to being composed at the end. They are game-changers.”

IMS linked up with W Hotel in Barcelona last night (May 25) featuring an opening party with Tong.

Source: Billboard.biz