Biz news: End of the road for Midem
NewsThe music industry’s biggest and longest running trade fair has been wound up by its owners, RX France.
Two years of Covid cancellations were the final straw for the Cannes-based get-together that has been running every year since 1967.
Midem Director Alexandre Deniot said that ‘due to the lasting pandemic and following a review of its activity, RX France has decided to no longer organize the Midem events’.
The fair’s trade names – Marché International du Disque et de l’Edition Musicale, and Midem – are up for grabs.
Record execs can meet just as easily via Zoom, so I can’t see it being missed.
Sign of the infective times. But are these big get-togethers of big industries really necessary? My impression is that such events belong to another time, the time of dinosaur record labels and the lke.
The clasical labels, who a decade and more ago used to attend Midem in droves, deserted Cannes once Classical:Next came into being, with C:N vastly cheaper to attend, not only for the cost of the entrance ticket, but also hotels, meals out etc.
It’s true that Zoom can cover the conventional stuff, and at C:N virtually every significant label can meet almost every significant distributor under one roof across three hectic days, but it’s the unplanned, sometimes accidental, meetings that are the interesting part, as these can generate new and unexpected business (I once met on the staircase a promoter, notorious for rarely replying to emails, and near-impossible to get by phone: both having ten minutes to spare, within that space we agreed a large engagement). So there still is a place for such events, even with the convenience of Zoom (just as going to the last few remaining sheet music shops always seems to end with the accidental purchase of something wonderful that in online shopping nowadays you rarely seem to achieve).
Voilà, that shows it.
They survived Hurwitz, but Covid was too much. . .