Music industry gathered at Midem in Cannes

The annual Midem music tradeshow was held in Cannes between January 20th and 25th. I had already spent three days in the south of Sweden attending a quarterly team meeting in Ystad and an annual kickoff meeting in Malmö with our product business unit. I arrived to Cannes-Palace Hotel late on Friday night January 19th but only half my luggage arrived at the same time… A few of my colleagues were sitting in the lobby loading their Walkman phones with music and videos so we sat up talking.

After a few hours sleep we took a nice walk along the boardwalk to Palais des Festivals where the MidemNet conference was held.



Midem attracts more than 120 exhibiting companies and 10,000 music professionals from almost 100 countries and from all sectors of the music value chain - recording, publishing, digital and mobile industry. They all meet at Midem to make deals, network, learn, and check out hot new talent. NRJ Music Awards was held at Palais des Festivals on the Saturday night and drew large crowds of fans who waited outside the Palais, the Carlton and the Noga Hilton to get a glimpse of various celebrities.


The MidemNet conference had some interesting panel discussions and case studies presented. My company had a booth in the Riviera Hall and our President was interviewed in a form of keynote address during MidemNet (read article and see some photos here). I was at the show for press briefings but got some time off the last day to walk around the show floor. After a few hours I had a whole bag full of new CD’s which I hope will expand my horizons a little bit – everything from Japanese traditional music to Cuban son (hooray!), rock from Lithuania to some small island close to Mauritius (a friend of mine, Vinay, is from Mauritius, so this caught my interest). Various publishers, record labels and independent artists were at Midem passing out CD’s with the aim of licensing their music to others in the music industry. Mobile music is definitely on the rise and everyone wanted to talk to Sony Ericsson.

There were parties every night at the Majestic, at Pias Bar on Majestic Beach (see photo below from the first night when I was there with my boss and our PR agency rep - yes, the first couple of nights, it was actually warm enough to walk around in short sleeves while the last night in Cannes it was all of a sudden hailing!) and there were concerts held at Hotel Martinez with bands from various countries.

I went to nice dinners every night but my favorite restaurant was without doubt Le 7ème Art on Rue des Frères Pradignac, which served the most exquisite tagliatelle with a creamy sauce based on French delicacy mushrooms called morilles. This was so good I went back there the last night again with a couple of really nice French merchandisers that had been working in our booth, and I ordered the same pasta dish.

We then went to the Midem closing party at Martinez, dancing and having fun until the wee hours, which meant I basically got no sleep since I had to do last minute packing before leaving for a New York flight from the Nice airport early in the morning. It’s amazing how you can immediately bond with and have so much fun with people you only get to know briefly when traveling. I already miss Pierre and Arnaud (see photo to the right), my two French cavaliers who showed me the best of the nightlife at the French Riviera. :-)


Video interviews

• Direct 8 (French TV channel) reports from Midem in Cannes, January 29, 2007

La vie est belle à Paris!

I just came back from a wonderful few days in Paris. A press trip through my work was the official excuse for going there, but I took the opportunity to spend the weekend in the French capital and enjoy a shopping extravaganza at Galeries Lafayette and checking out the Parisian salsa scene and say hi to some congress friends.

Hotel lobby and restrooms (gents' / ladies' rooms).

The first two nights I stayed at a cute and modern hotel called Mayet close to the salsa club La Coupole on Boulevard du Montparnasse. Quite typical me, upon arrival to Paris I had still not made any private arrangements for the stay other than sending a couple of SMS's and e-mails to salsa friends to find out where to go dancing on Friday night. In pouring rain I therefore had to spend a good part of late Friday night trying to find a hotel with rooms available at decent rates, the priority was vicinity to the salsa club to not lose too much "dancing time"... Stumbling upon Hôtel Mayet was therefore rather fortunate. I liked their interior design and friendly hospitality, and was also rather surprised of the hotel staff's excellent English.

La Coupole was crowded, smoky and there was no dance discipline - people were dancing Cuban and Puerto Rican style next too each other without paying attention to where they led the lady so I ended up bumping into or even hitting a few people when the man spun me in all directions - so I found the place quite tedious. The upside was that I got to dance with Venance, another Italian guy I met at the Brussels Salsa Congress in June, in Cannes in July and at the UK Salsa Congress in Bognor Regis in September, and a couple of crazy but fun American hispanics that had been living in Paris for years. All in all, it turned out to be good exercise. :-)

I basically spent Saturday and Sunday in Galeries Lafayette - I went a little crazy and spent rediculous amounts of money there! Usually I don't like big department stores - I get a headache from passing through the perfume department, get annoyed when there are too many people and then get lost among all the floors and stores. But Galeries Lafayette kept me mesmerized. It had a great mix of high-quality design stores, jewellry, lingerie and more affordable clothes shops with brands like Clockhouse and Pimpkie (one of my favorites). Evening strolls in the area also took me past Invalides and closer to the Eiffel Tower so I could ensure to see something else than the inner walls of the department store and salsa clubs...

On Sunday afternoon I changed hotel to Radisson SAS at L'Arc de Triomphe. Then I took the métro to Bastille and arrived at the Sunday salsa social at Barrio Latino on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine with only 25 min to go. It was a great place with very nice atmosphere and a staircase inside circling its way up around the dance floor so you could actually see 4-5 floors up like in a theater. I wish I had had more time there. Willy was DJ both at Barrio Latino and later at O'Sullivans next to Moulin Rouge (métro Blanche), so the music was great also at the night club. I had a fantastic dance night and kept dancing till 3am! There were basically only exceptionally good dancers and I enjoyed salsa, cha cha cha, bachata, zouc... A very pleasant experience, and I can't wait to go back!

I went to pass time between the salsa sessions by having dinner at a trendy restaurant and bar close to Place de la Bastille, enjoying champagne, some red wine, Chèvre Chaud and crêpes with nutella. I was thinking to myself that Paris might be a good place to live for a few years - a continental metropol and with easy access to many other European cities. My thoughts were interrupted all of a sudden when a male guest had a grand mal seizure (epileptic attack) in the restaurant - his date got scared and freaked out when her friend displayed some aggressive behavior due to not knowing where he was or why after the spasms, I suspect. Paramedics arrived and it was all rather turbulent for a while until they had everything under control, the guest could breathe normally without oxygen mask and be led out.

Monday morning two colleagues and I met with our PR agency at their offices in Paris and had a number of good interviews with French reporters over the course of the day. Our gaming spokesperson was filmed by Canal Plus for a show to be broadcasted in January and demonstrated games on a number of our phones and answered some questions on camera. It will be interesting to see the results of this press trip and the two previous ones to Munich in Germany and Milan, Italy in November. The purpose of these press trips have been to educate local media about mobile technology, development platforms and mobile content. There has been quite big interest in these topics, perhaps bigger than what our local PR managers had thought.