Feb 2023 Measure of Music Event | Closing Remarks

Measure of Music is a three-day music & data conference & workshop/hackathon. The third annual event took place from February 24-26 with 2800+ viewers, participants & contributors.

Read more & rewatch on measureofmusic.com. Below are the closing remarks I delivered at the end of this year's event.

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Alright, so that's a wrap on Measure of Music 2023!

I'd be lying if I didn't say I was exhausted but it honestly does get a (tiny) bit easier each year. My husband joked I could package up this operational process and sell it to which I looked at him and said, "yes, add another job to my list".

All seriousness though, it's been an incredible year 3. I'm honestly still shocked to say Year 3. We didn't quite hit 3000 registrations but increasing registrations by 1000 people each year isn't too bad.

At this point, if you've watched before you know the drill. In fact, I almost forgot to include this this year because everything I'm about to say should be the default not the exception. This year, like the previous year’s our 40 speakers have been majority minority in both gender & race representing 9 different countries. We had no all male or all white panels. In fact, again this year, we had an all women panel and a panel where all speakers were people of color. And as I always like to remind everyone, you can do that and not have to call it a Women in Music or quote unquote Diversity Panel. And in addition, for the second year, all non-sponsor talk speakers are offered payment because all voices are valuable and should be compensated as such. 

Every year, I strive to do a bit better and this year, I'm especially proud of the increase in Asian representation for our speakers.

Speaking of Asia, I want to talk a bit about accessibility & representation. On Friday evening, a young woman in Indonesia emailed me. She told me the conference stream wasn't working for her and emphasized how important this conference was to her because she's a recent grad trying to find a job in music. I did a quick Google search and discovered our streaming provider Vimeo was blocked in Indonesia. I was really bummed to hear that and started to try to figure out solutions. She was able to find a work around and has since emailed me once a day just to tell me how much she's enjoying the conference. So, insert that tears in your eyes, smiling, proud emoji here because honestly, after Friday, I was exclusively doing this entire conference just for her and really didn't care if anyone else showed up to watch. Hopefully, she's still watching today and if you are, please know that I'm rooting for you, so much. 

That's why I do this. It's not for clout (trust me, there are easier ways...), it's not for money (I don't actually make any profit with all of this. All the money gets redistributed...), it's to help people because I know how tough the music industry can be and I want to do as much as I can to make it a bit easier. One of my favorite quotes is from a writer, Daniel Swensen, he said, "If you want people to suffer like you did because you turned out fine, you did not, in fact, turn out fine." and every time I hear people brush of discrimination, unethical work practices, unending unpaid labor, harassment, unnecessary gatekeeping, lack of professional development, or just generally hostility & nastiness, I think of that quote, and very often say it directly to that person. (Yes, I know, I'm probably fun at parties.)

This event is and will always be for people that want something better. Or as the kids would say, I believe everyone deserves a #SoftLife.

Getting to that point takes work and sacrifice. It's not easy but it is doable. 

This year, in addition to the speaker stats I mentioned earlier, of those almost 3000 registrations that disclosed, 70% were people of color, 57% are a gender minority, over one third say English is not their first language, 18% identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, 52% are under 30 years old, and 92 countries are represented. Big shout out to the sole representatives from Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Estonia to name a few.

While this level of representation sounds impressive, it was actually easy and exactly why this event stays virtual because when the global majority can attend, the global majority does. Measure of Music looks like what the world looks like because the world is invited. Not only is Measure of Music virtual but the planning, logistics, and operations before and during the event is handled entirely virtually. You can have amazing experiences, build culture & community, and you can do great work virtually. Most of our project participants can attest to just that. Yes, sometimes there's tech issues, but I've been to plenty of conferences and meeting in person that had tech issues while every person was in the room. If you're a decision make, I hope you take some of this into account when you consider your back to office policies.

In addition to remaining almost entirely virtual, I'm continuously working to remove as many barriers to entry as possible for this event. To overcome economic barriers, this event has been and will always be free to participants & attendees because access to education & community should not be hindered by cost. In addition, the reason this event is on a weekend is, though I recognize not everyone gets weekends off, it always the most people to be able to participate. One small thing we do is allow project participants to start working as late as 6:30PM PST on the Friday of the event despite that being 2:30AM for us in the UK because I recognize that not everyone had the ability to take the day off and especially in the US where paid work leave is considered a luxury rather than a human right, we can't fault others for things that are not their fault.

Again, I encourage companies to think about actively removing barriers for their employees and artists. Starting from a place of empathy makes practicing this so innate. For example, any time I'm hiring for a new role that I'd like to conduct an in-person interview for I always offer times before or after a typical work day (i.e. 8AM, 6PM, etc.) this allows the person to not have to find an excuse to leave their current role during their work day for the uncertainty of a new role. Yes, for a day or two it may be a minor inconvenience for me, but I never received anything but immense gratitude every time I provided this level of accommodation to a prospective employee (plus, bonus perk, I always had my pick of conference room!).

Whenever I write this closing talk, I think a lot about the themes of the weekend and as you've probably picked up on by now, it's barriers. This is the year I feel like I've knocked down a lot of barriers with Measure of Music. While we've always had our nerdy friends by our side (shout out to Chartmetric for being our only 3x sponsor!), this is the first year we've had a label and a distributor as sponsors. Part of the reason I started Measure of Music is for the industry to understand the importance of data. Not the importance of data in data-related roles but the importance of data in the music industry as a whole. So, this year it was an absolute pleasure to welcome TuneCore and The Orchard to the ranks of nerdy friends alongside our 2x sponsors SoundCloud, Musiio, Feed Media Group, Luminate and Audiense.

And we welcomed for the first time as sponsors BMAT Music Innovators and HIFI. HIFI pulled double duty as both a supporting & location sponsor. BMAT also served as a location sponsor for this year. For the first time, we allowed the project participants the choice to meet up with their groups in person. HIFI offered up their Brooklyn office space and BMAT offered up their Barcelona office for the weekend. Seeing those photos come in of the teams working in-person was wonderful. I have to say, as a mid-Atlantic girlie, I'll always love New York City, but the enthusiasm shown by our Barcelona teams was unmatched. It's almost seems like when you offer up opportunities in places that are underserved for those opportunities (such as access to the music industry outside of the major markets), that people thrive. 😉

Speaking about meeting in-person I want to shout out · Elies Delgado Tamarit · . Elies was a project participant year 1 for Measure of Music and fast forward 2 years later, he was instrumental to having BMAT as one of our location sponsors for Year 3 and I'm so grateful for that. The reason I'm bringing this up is two-fold. 

1. It's a strong testament to the power of community. That a rising tide lifts all boats and what you put out in the world out of generosity and kindness will come back to you. 
2. It's shows exactly what it looks like when an employer removes the barriers to help their employees make things happen.

So often people reach out to me trying to figure out ways to have their employer involved with Measure of Music and they so often don't even know who the right person is to approach. How to action real change or push through real initiatives at most companies is often ambiguous at best but when you empower your employees, magic can happen. A great example is my dear friend and 3x mentor for Measure of Music, Jeremiah Gogo who was able to create an internship program at Warner Music UK specifically targeting & supporting young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds thanks to the support of HR and the MD. This was able to happen because he was able to find the right stakeholders to make it happen. If you're an employer, imagine all the amazing ideas and initiatives that fall to wayside not because of lack of bandwidth or lack of passion but literally because your employee just didn't know the right person to email.

I've always struggled to get companies to be involved in Measure of Music to provide data or prizes for the hackathon but most importantly to participate in our career fair. When I was brainstorming with the wider Measure of Music support team, one of the reasons posed why this is because it's a weekend, however; in order to make Measure of Music happen this year over 100 people not even including out project participants were involved. That's our speakers, mentors, judges, weekend staff, career fair companies, sponsor booths, startups that pitched and the on-site support.

100 people gave up a small (or large) part of their weekend to be involved in Measure of Music so surely the barrier to be involved isn't letting go of 2 hours of a weekend virtually. Instead what I came to realize, as I field messages every week from companies that are hiring especially for data related roles that are seeking my recommendations, is that the heavy lift isn't the 2 hours on the weekend, it's the hours before trying to figure out exactly who to talk to make those 2 hours happen. So rather selfishly, if you're a decision maker, I encourage you to make it easier for your employees. Systematic change is impossible without the organizations in power stepping up. Sometimes stepping up is as easy as an email address for employees to send initiatives they'd like to work with, it's establishing a self-submitted internal speaker list to provide to conferences that aren't just your most senior executives who are almost always overwhelmingly White and male, and it's celebrating and featuring your Asian American, Pacific Islander, queer, Black and women staff members & artists in the other 11 months of the year. 

Big change can be caused by small actions and this, all of this, could be so much easier if we want it to be. All of us together. 

I’m incredibly grateful to have the support of so many people & companies that share this ethos so for the last time, I must thank our presenting sponsors:

Audiense , a consumer segmentation and cultural understanding platform that helps companies identify relevant audiences and discover amazing actionable insights to inform strategy. SoundCloud , a next-generation music entertainment company powered by an ecosystem of artists, fans, and thriving communities. 

Plus, additional support from:

• the artificial intelligence music tech company, Musiio by SoundCloud
• distributor and artist & label services company, The Orchard ; 
• executive management firm, jump.global ; 
• music streaming & social data platform, Chartmetric ; 
• global entertainment & music data & analytics provider, Luminate ;
• global distribution, publishing administration and promotional services company, TuneCore ; 

Feed Media Group (FMG) , a company that makes it easy, fast, and legal for businesses to use licensed music to create engaging customer experiences that drive revenue; and HIFI , music financial rights organization advocating for artist-centric innovation and transparency.

Additional support from our location sponsor BMAT Music Innovators , a music innovation company with a mission to index all music usage and ownership data.

And media & promotional support from global community of women and gender minorities in the music industry, shesaid.so ; global music and tech community, The Digilogue ; women in musical arts non-profit community, Women in Music ; and LGBTQ+ music industry professionals non-profit, Queer Capita .

This isn't possible without you.

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Every year, on the final day of Measure of Music, I wear a shirt that encompasses the tone of the year. A few months I was at a music industry conference and mentioned I was headed off to Vegas for the pop punk & emo festival When We Were Young Festival. The person I was speaking too literally audibly scoffed at me. I remember thinking, in the year of our Lord, 2022, we're really still judging people on their music taste? So today I'm wearing a shirt from my favorite band that recently reunited, it says, "This is our culture" and it's a lyric from Fall Out Boy. I grew up listening to pop punk, I grew up hanging out on Warped Tour, I grew up running a fan zine and that sub-culture and community directly affected who I am both professionally & personally today. Quick shout out to the Black queer pop punk band Meet Me @ The Alter for being the representation I would have loved to have as a kid.

That's to say, just as systems and processes can be barriers, so can people--that's why it's important to find your community. So many in this industry will try to take away your joy and you have to actively make sure you don't let them.

Huge thank you to our judges, mentors, weekend staff, sponsors and everyone else involved with making this year happen.

So, with that it feels apt to say, "Thanks for the memories" and see you all next year.