The MIA Music Summit is a new full-day event in Miami Beach planned for March 24 to bring together music and tech entrepreneurs, record executives, music journalists, hackers and musicians. More than 400 people have already registered, said MIA Music Summit organizer Demian Bellumio.
MIA Collective is hosting the event at New World Center with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as well as Senzari, Choose Digital, .CO Internet, SESAC Latina, Mobile Roadie and others. “The MIA Music Summit is another reflection of the diversity of budding entrepreneurs contributing to the momentum of Miami’s startup community,” said Matt Haggman, Knight Foundation program director for Miami, in announcing the Knight support in a press release.
The previously announced summit also unveiled new speakers, including Cory Ondrejka (pictured here), vice president of engineering at Facebook; Martin Varsavsky, founder of Fon; Eric Sheinkop, co-founder and CEO of Music Dealers; Mahbod Moghadam, co-founder of Rap Genius; Marc Zimet, Viacom vice president of music and talent; and Alfonso Perez-Soto, senior vice president at Warner Music. On the agenda are topics such as crowdfunding, big data, social media, branding, music licensing and the next generation of music hardware. Music startups such as Splice and Jukely will demo their projects. There also will be high-tech music performances by Nagual Sounds, winners of Midemlabs 2014, and Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, said Bellumio, a partner at MIA Collective and COO of Senzari who is one of the main organizers of MIA Music Summit.
New details of the MIA Music HackDay March 22-23 were also released. Open to technologists, engineers and programmers, the hackathon will be at The LAB Miami in Wynwood, which is co-organizing the event. Prizes for the best use of APIs will be awarded from Choose Digital, MusicGraph, Senzari and 3scale. The hackathon will close with Miami’s first “Startup Battle of the Bands,” in which local startups will showcase their digital musical talents, Bellumio said. Finalists of the hackathon will be showcased at the MIA Music Summit.
Derrick Ashong of Fusion (pictured here), the Miami-based Univision-ABC channel, will emcee the MIA Music Summit and be also part of the hackathon plans. Ashong has joined forces with “Made in the Lab,” a new Miami-based advisory service for tech startups, and Stan Jakubowicz, an award-winning filmmaker, to create THINC (Technology in Harmony with Narrative and Creativity), a multiplatform series of town-hall conversations with leaders, artists and innovators. THINC’s first guest will be Cory Ondrejka, vice president of engineering at Facebook; THINC will document Ondrejka’s experiences at the summit — from judging the hackathon and interacting with the local developer community, to a town-hall conversation, which will be webcast live.
Tickets for the MIA Music Summit are available until March 9 for $199; $299 thereafter. Students with a valid ID can purchase tickets for $99. For more information on the MIA Music Summit or the MIA Music Hackday, visit www.mms.co.