Unfortunately I was not able to make the first Revolt conference this year and I’d like to thank some of the key staff for inviting me. In addition allow me to say, I am SO INCREDIBLY proud to see an iindependent forward-thinking company like Revolt headed by industry vet Diddy grab the bull by the horns left behind by industry greats Jack the Rapper, Urban Network, Impact and the BRE conference. I have not seen an event like this in almost 20 years as conferences pretty much died when consolidation kicked in in the mid 90s and the trades no longer had the leverage to promote to urban PDs. At this point, PDs are not the focus since there are so many more avenues to expose music at this point but they would be foolish not to connect with an event like this nonetheless for their own futures in and out of the industry.
I have been asked repeatedly to do a Radio Facts conference and have even been offered the money to do it but I didn’t want to put on a conference unless it was like the one Revolt TV just did, with today’s decision makers and a clear focus on the future of the industry. THIS is where we are supposed to be (see vid) and how it’s supposed to be done. This footage reminds me of what we have needed so desperately in the industry for many years now and I am happy to see successful vets with the new generation of industry people springing up and growing to create their own legacies in our great industry. Thanks again to hard working, innovative and forward thinking vets like Diddy, Keith Clinkscales and Andre Harrell for creating this amazing platform to show the new and the vet generations where the industry is going. This Revolt TV conference has renewed a greater faith for me in the urban industry. Congrats and many happy returns. Hopefully we will have more pics within the next couple of days. You can also see another video of Diddy answering questions about branding and doing business on our sister site BlogWallet.com
Read Jimmy Iovine’s full speech below.
Hello everybody. When my friend Puffy invited me to come here to Miami to talk about “the state of our business,” the first question that came to my mind was: exactly what business are we talking about anyway?
After all, we all know that the music business today can feel like one big free-for-all and I realized that there wasn’t much more I could do from inside the industry
So I decided to take a shot and see if I could do some really positive work from the tech side.
So for any of you who are out there, still wondering who the h*** is this guy and why am I supposed to be listening to him, here’s a very short version of my history in the business of music:
I started out a few years ago in the record business back when it really was the record business.
I began as a second engineer in a great New York recording studio called The Record Plant.
With a little luck and a lot of hard work, I learned my trade and got promoted to recording engineer.
Then somehow with a little more luck and a lot of help from John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau and Patti Smith, I finally became a record producer — mainly by telling people, hey, now I’m a record producer.
Eventually, after eighteen years, I moved on from being a producer and started an independent record company (see more here)
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