Presenters:
The Renegade
Barry Coffing
AP: Putting together a renegade showcase has become pretty common at SXSW - but a full day of panels & evening networking party is quite ambitious. Why did you decide to take this on?
BC: I’ve been involved with licensing & composing for film & TV for a long time - I know a lot about the industry & have close relationships with many key players. I thought that the quality of information that was delivered at the panels that I attended last year were – rather lame and not worthwhile – especially for the mid-level artist.
Maybe I’m naďve but I knew that I could do a better job & decided to go for it about 3 months ago.
AP: It only took about 3 months to pull this together? How did you budget for this & do you expect to make any money?
BC: I really don’t plan on making any money here – I hope that I don’t end up losing too much either. It’s purely altruistic on my part – I didn’t write up a plan or create a set budget and maybe if I had thought it through longer I would have reconsidered! But I wanted to give beginners and the more advanced mid-level artist a real opportunity to learn what they need to know & to get them in front of music supervisors to get real feed-back.
AP: So what are the costs involved?
BC: We’re taking over some rooms in The Speakeasy on Congress Street on Wednesday & then we’ll be moving upstairs at night for some live showcases & demo reviews for supervisors. Decided to keep the costs way down for attendees & open it to the public – there’s a beginners series that only costs $20 & a advanced series for those further in their career for only $60. After the day panels you can also participate in “The Moment Of Truth” where you can play a 1 minute track & get feedback from music supervisors.
So our out-of pocket is for use of The Speakeasy and a bit of a stipend for some of the panelists & we got a little bit of sponsorship to help defray costs. I expect the whole thing will end up costing between $5-10,000.
AP: How are you promoting it – are you doing a lot of pre-registration or are you planning on walk-ins?
BC: We’re promoting it mostly by word of mouth & expect that most of the traffic at least for this first year will be walk-ins.
AP: If you don’t expect to turn a profit – what are your goals for this event?
BC: As I said, it’s mostly altruistic – looking to help build our brand and provide a service that helps create a community between bands, publishers & music supervisors.
AP: How will you know if it’s successful?
BC: By the amount of positive feedback we get.
AP: Are you concerned about competing with the SXSW machine?
BC: SXSW has tried to use it’s muscle to prevent a lot of the organic events that spring up around it – but what they don’t understand is that if people are coming to Austin, having a good time & learning a lot they’re going to attribute that to SXSW whether they attended official events or not.
