Timbaland To Speak At Midem

Midem, once hailed as the most important event for the recorded music sector, took place in January for most of its standing. With the decline of the recorded music business, Midem also lost some of its significance, leading organizers to start inviting the live sector to Cannes and launching the Midem Festival in 2012. The festival didn’t really take off and was replaced by a series of open-air concerts in 2015. Last year’s move to summer was another effort to revive the conference’s concept.

The former size of the event, which attracted more than 10,000 professionals in its heyday, hasn’t been reached yet. Official numbers weren’t released after the 2015 edition (2014: 6,150), which was praised by some as the best in years, while other industry players still remained skeptical. Bruno Crolot, who directed the event for the past five years, stepped down shortly after. Last year’s high-profile keynote was given by LA Reid. This year Timbaland “will talk about the mechanisms of being a producer and how to produce a hit record,” a statement reads.

Midem 2016 will also host a session with representatives of the EU Commission, which has allocated a euro 1.46 billion budget for the creative sector in Europe. The representatives will present the results of working groups that were tasked with establishing how to spend that money. In the run-up to Midem, Yourope, which represents large parts of the European live businesses, has been lobbying on behalf of the sector in meetings with the EU Commission in Brussels. How much impact a euro 1.46 billion budget can make, when it has to be spent among 38 countries and hundreds of projects that qualify, remains to be seen.