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VIP- News premium ›› Vol. 135 ›› April 2011
McGowan’s Musings: The never-ending pursuit of music industry knowledge and news for your information and, hopefully, entertainment has taken me to Estonia, Scotland and France since the last issue of VIP-News. The first of these trips, to Tallinn Music Week, also attended by VIPs Ronni and Peter, certainly had its thrills and spills; Eurosonic/ Noorderslag’s Peter Smidt and Ruud Berends and myself found ourselves staring at the still iced over sea from the roof of what looked like a Soviet era concert hall with some very ominous cracking noises coming from under our feet. I joined several others slipping on treacherously icy pavements – I’d show you the bruises but we’d have to know each other very well! – but the worst casualty was Martin Elbourne of the Great Escape and Glastonbury who unfortunately broke three ribs in a fall – we wish him a speedy recovery! However, as you will see from our extensive report the event itself was certainly worth visiting. The visit to the ‘Athens of the North’, Scotland’s second biggest City and it’s capital, Edinburgh was completely opposite in terms of weather, unseasonably warm and sunny, but ‘Wide Days’ was also a confer-
Paris by the way was to discuss plans for the second edition of the MaMA Event, which will again be based in the venues along Pigalle and in the cafes and bars of Montmartre and will take place on October 21-22 – watch this space!
Allan McGowan
ence and showcase event worth attending. I’ve always been impressed – and I don’t say this purely because of my family connections, honest! – by the concentration of the panel audiences at events like this and GoNorth, and by their willingness to ask questions. I was quite surprised in Tallinn by the numbers of lap-tops and smart phones in use during the panels – some were taking notes of course but certainly many were doing other things. Much has been written about a generation of ‘multi-taskers’, so maybe this is what we’re seeing and maybe we’ll just have to get used to it – or make panels so dynamic and interesting that everyone will be totally absorbed!
With the festival season not far off and with the US business in particular hoping to avoid the slow sales, cancellations and postponements of last year the 2011 buzz phrase appears to be ‘value for money’. Following the news that U2’s 360° tour has overtaken the Rolling Stones’ Bigger Bang, making £341m with 20 gigs to go, Manager Paul McGuinness said he and the band were proud of the tour. “That dollar figure for the gross looks enormous,” he said. “Of course I can’t tell you what the net is, but I can tell you that the band spend enormous sums on production for their audience. Fans all over the world agree that a ticket to U2 360° is good value for money.” Talking about the 2011 US Festival season John D’Esposito, founder of US festival Bamboozle planned for April 29-May 1 in East Rutherford, N.J, remarked, “It’s like a Walmart/Costco kind of scenario,we are providing so much entertainment. If you
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