Our inaugural Wavelengths Summit will provide a forum for the next generation of music-tech leaders, creators, and innovators to build community and exchange ideas on the future of the music business.

We will feature interactive roundtables, workshops, and debates that showcase the diverse experience and ingenuity of our community members, across three overarching themes:

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Recap Articles

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Lessons from our inaugural Wavelengths Summit

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Balancing niche and mainstream on the road to Web3 adoption

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What it really means to be "fan-first"

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Inside Sony Computer Science Laboratories' vision for music AI

Confirmed Speakers

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Sam Backer + Saxon Baird

Co-Hosts, Money 4 Nothing

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Kat Bassett

Community Lead, Water & Music

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BRUX

Artist

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Tatiana Cirisano

Music Industry Analyst, MIDiA Research

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Derek Davies

Co-Founder/President, Medallion

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Kaitlyn Davies

Membership Lead, FWB; Curatorial Partnerships, Refraction

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Nicole d'Avis

Prev. Seed Club

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Kevin Duquette

Co-Founder, Topshelf Records/tone.audio

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Alexander Flores

Tech & Strategy, Water & Music

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Shav Garg

Co-Founder/CEO, Indify

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Tom Gayner

CEO, Levellr

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Chrissy Greco

Music Marketer

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Cherie Hu

Founder, Water & Music

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Charlie Kaplan

VP Product, Audiomack

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Denisha Kuhlor

Founder, Stan

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Jonathan Larr

Founding Partner, Icarus Law, P.C.

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Stefan Lattner

Managing Researcher, Sony CSL Paris

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Sarah Mackenzie

Creative Director, MUTEK

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Kristin Malossi

DJ; Booker, Nowadays

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Melanie McClain

Founder, Blurred Lines & DSP Consultant

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Liz Pelly

Music Journalist

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Mark Redito

Head of Community, Songcamp

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Austin Robey

Co-founder, Metalabel

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Jake Rosenthal

Founder/Owner/Head of Marketing & Branding, Elsewhere

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Brandon Sánchez

Artist Manager, ATC Management (Yaeji)

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Sam Schoonover

Founder, Forward Studio; Innovation Lead, Coachella

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Jeremy Stern

Co-Founder, Catalog

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Michael Turbot

Technology Promotion Manager, Sony CSL Paris

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David Turner

Writer, Penny Fractions / Strategy Manager, SoundCloud

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Jeanette Wall

U.S. Label Manager, City Slang

Programming

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Fandom + Community

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Emerging Tech

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Industry Bridges

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Sponsored

9:30am

Summit Opens

9:30am - 12:45pm

Creator Tools Coffee Cart Presented by: HIFI & Chartmetric

10am - 10:15am

Kick Off: State of the Union Address
Main Stage

10:15am - 11am

Get To Know Ya! Morning Networking Session
Main Stage

11am - 11:45am

Music Community Building and Decentralization: Lessons from History
Currents Room
Featuring:
Kaitlyn Davies
Membership Lead, FWB; Curatorial Partnerships, Refraction
Nicole D'Avis
Prev. Seed Club
Austin Robey
Co-founder, Metalabel
Mark Redito
Head of Community, Songcamp
Kevin Duquette
Co-Founder, Topshelf Records/tone.audio
A roundtable discussing the lessons that decentralized music communities can learn from the broad history of grassroots music movements, including co-ops, collectives, and artist-focused independent labels.

11:15am - 12:15pm

What Does it Mean to Be Fan-First?
Main Stage
Featuring:
Tatiana Cirisano
Music Industry Analyst, MIDiA Research
Denisha Kuhlor
Founder, Stan
Derek Davies
Co-Founder/President, Medallion
Brandon Sánchez
Artist Manager, ATC Management (Yaeji)
BRUX
Artist
A roundtable exploring what it really means to build 'fan-first' technologies and experiences for music. Themes to highlight include the chicken-and-egg tension of building first for fans vs. for artists and industry-stakeholders, trends in fans’ adoption of tech, and monetizing fans.

12:15pm - 1pm

URL to IRL: Uniting Music Communities Online and Offline
Currents Room
Featuring:
Jake Rosenthal
Founder/Owner/Head of Marketing & Branding, Elsewhere
Kat Bassett
Community Lead, Water & Music
Kristin Malossi
DJ; Booker, Nowadays
Tom Gayner
CEO, Levellr
A roundtable exploring case studies in building hybrid online/offline communities and brands. Attendees will gain a better understanding of approaches that they can employ to produce a more integrated approach to engaging fans across the IRL-URL divide, no matter their community size or budget.

12:30pm - 1:30pm

Moving Streaming Forward: Alternative Models and Artist Strategies
Main Stage
Featuring:
David Turner
Writer, Penny Fractions / Strategy Manager, SoundCloud
Charlie Kaplan
VP Product, Audiomack
Chrissy Greco
Music Marketer
Liz Pelly
Music Journalist
A roundtable that aims to move the streaming conversation forward through concrete analysis on alternative, mission-aligned models for streaming payouts, as well as alternative strategies for artists to engage with streaming to produce more engaged and sustainable fanbases. We will be light on speculation and heavy on concrete case studies — examining what approaches are working, and which ones need to evolve.

12:45pm - 1:30pm

Money 4 Nothing: Live Podcast Taping
Stream Room
Featuring:
Sam Backer + Saxon Baird
Co-Hosts, Money 4 Nothing
Money 4 Nothing cohosts Sam Backer and Saxon Baird lead a discussion on what the history of the industry’s transition to digital music can tell us about the current moment with AI — with a particular focus on the leverage held by the major labels, and how that could play out in a variety of structural ways.

1:30pm - 2:30pm

Lunch Break
Our Recs

2:30pm - 3:30pm

Web3: Balancing Niche and Mainstream on the Road to Adoption
Main Stage
Featuring:
Sarah Mackenzie
Creative Director, MUTEK
Jeremy Stern
Co-Founder, Catalog
Sam Schoonover
Founder, Forward Studio; Innovation Lead, Coachella
Melanie McClain
Founder, Blurred Lines & DSP Consultant
A roundtable diving into the contrast between niche and mainstream/corporate approaches to growing music Web3 projects — particularly the tension between the grassroots ethos at the core of Web3’s origins and the major-player impact we’re seeing drive Web3 adoption in 2023.

2:45pm - 3:30pm

WORKSHOP — SonyCSL Presents: Music AI, from Science to Production
Stream Room
Featuring:
Cherie Hu
Founder, Water & Music
Stefan Lattner
Managing Researcher, Sony CSL Paris
Michael Turbot
Technology Promotion Manager, Sony CSL Paris
In this workshop, the Sony CSL Music team will deep-dive into music AI and its implications for musicians' creative practices, spanning both scientific and business applications. The session will include a walkthrough of Sony CSL's new AI music tooling prototypes, alongside a broader discussion of the different ways that artists can approach using and interacting with new AI technologies in order to open up new avenues for creativity.

2:45pm - 4pm

Boomy: Prompt Generation Interactive Zone

3:15pm - 4pm

Defining the 'X Factor': Is AI Creative Enough to Be Copyrightable?
Currents Room
Featuring:
Jonathan Larr
Founding Partner, Icarus Law, P.C.
Alexander Flores
Tech & Strategy, Water & Music
This roundtable will combine legal, creative, and philosophical perspectives to explore the idea that there are some aspects of the human creative process that can never be replicated by machine learning tools. In particular, we will discuss the effect this lack of creative spark can have on the copyrightability of AI generated works.

4pm - 5pm

Show Me the Money: Comparing Financing Models for Emerging Artists
Main Stage
Featuring:
Jeanette Wall
U.S. Label Manager, City Slang
Cherie Hu
Founder, Water & Music
Mark Redito
Head of Community, Songcamp
Shav Garg
Co-Founder/CEO, Indify
This debate will explore the wide range of financing strategies available for today’s emerging artists, including artist-services deals, direct-from-fan crowdfunding, private investment, community-powered approaches like DAOs — and, yes, standard label deals themselves. There will be plenty of opportunities for our audience to critique the arguments presented: Which of these financing options really work, for whom, and why?

5pm - 6pm

Web3 Happy Hour Presented by: Lens & Sound.xyz

6:00pm

Summit Close

Our Sponsors

WAVE Partners

soundexchange sonycsl hifi refraction

STREAM Partners

boomy chartmetric fwb lens mach1 maykit
soundxyz

Pricing

$300 for non-members

(+fees/tax)

Earlybird pricing is already sold out, so act quickly to reserve your spot!

$225 for members

(+fees/tax)

Members, check your inbox and our Discord server for the discount code.

We also have discounts for students and journalists. Reach out to summit@waterandmusic.com to learn more!

About Us

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Water & Music is a research and intelligence network for the new music business.

Our mission is to make the music industry more innovative, cooperative, and transparent. We accomplish this through a social, peer-to-peer approach to knowledge exchange — building collaborative reports, databases, educational courses, and more that are consistently early-to-market on identifying emerging music trends.

Our membership gives you unlimted access to our music/tech research archive and surrounding network of 2,000 music-industry professionals.

Learn more and join today!

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Wavelengths is our traveling conversation series at the forefront of music and tech, encouraging candid dialogue among builders, creators, consumers, and thinkers. We've held pop-up events in New York, Miami, London, and Washington, D.C., with more events to come in other cities around the world.

Members can browse an archive of our Wavelengths recordings here.

Stay in the know on Wavelengths

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