The number of exhibitors was said to be low. Due to online piracy.

This is what Dieter Gorny, CEO of German Body of Music Industry (BVMI) told the public when Popkomm (founded by Gorny), Germany’s most important and one of Europe’s largest music business conferences was cancelled on 19 June.

Then, Jana Herwig, addressing Berlin’s music scene blogged from Vienna: “Can’t you do anything about it and make it happen yourself, bottom-up style? #unkomm”. She coined the hash tag paving the way. By 7 July at the founding meeting, all2gethernow [access restricted, 2016-03-10] was born.

It took us little more than 10 weeks to prepare for an event including festival, barcamp and conference on exactly the same date Popkomm 2009 should’ve been taking place. There’s two camp days packed with about 50 sessions and the conference presenting 12+ speaker slots.

Not everyone was able to fit an appearance into his personal schedule that quickly.

Nevertheless, all2gethernow amongst others features

  • Melvin Benn (Director of Festivals // Mean Fiddler)
  • Amke Block (CEO // Audiomagnet)
  • Julie Borchard-Young (“The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD”)
  • Andrew Dubber (NewMusicStrategies.com)
  • Jim Griffin (Choruss)
  • Paul Keller (Project Lead // Creative Commons Netherlands)
  • Laurent Kratz (CEO/CoFounder // Jamendo)
  • Gerd Leonhard (MediaFuturist.com)
  • Alexander Ljung (CEO/CoFounder // SoundCloud)
  • Tim Renner (CEO // MotorEntertainment)
  • Kilian Steiner (Director/Legal Advisor // GEMA)
  • Wim Wenders

This event has no budget but great sponsors. Anyone of us is in it for the matter.

all2gethernow – a new music and culture convention.

This text has been published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported licence. If you would like to make use of the text or parts of it in a way that goes beyond the scope please get in touch with me.