Music on the Cusp of Block-Chain Revolution

This year’s Convergence Music Festival had a conference drawing most of the main players in the Block Chain revolution on Friday 24^th March 2017 at the Citizen M Hotel in London’s Tower Hill EC3N 4DJ.

Block-Chain in itself is very broad and confusing with the multiplications of data as argued by Phil Barry.

But in other sense, even though it is still in its experimental stages, tapping information from the panel, it still seems to be the basis and medium through which Art, Music and Technology could best be unified and easily accessed.

Separating the conference’s panel into two sessions, the first panel included Cliff Fluet who is a partner for Digital Media and Brand Entertainment-Lewis Silkin.

Phil Barry, founder of Ujo Music and Blokur, and also Sue Mclean from Block-Chain and Smart Contract Task Force at Morrison and Foerster.

The second panel had the C.E.O of Digital Catapult Jeremy Silver, Imogen Heap a recording artist and producer, Mycelia and Vaughn McKenzie a Block-Chain entrepreneur at Jaak.

As the moderator, Marcus O’Dair a Convenor for Block-Chain for Creative Industries cluster at Middlesex University was able to streamline various unanswered questions challenging the experience and movement of the Block-Chain revolution.

Although a concrete conclusion and explanation was not reached as a measuring yardstick with regards to the Block-Chain revolution, however there were impending signs that shows its potential as the next big thing in the combination of music, art and technology wizardry.

Convergence as a music festival has been entertaining and educating over 100,000 attendees across London since its beginning in 2014.

It is a 6-day annual festival which happens in March, facilitating an active conversation around performances, technologies and also serves as a platform for diverse projects, one-off special events and collaborations featuring emerging artists and established pioneers.

Convergence Sessions is a hub within the festival that is created for a diverse range of artistic practitioners to share their insights, ideas and techniques in a creative and interdisciplinary atmosphere, through a series of talks, workshops and demonstrations.

Since last year, Convergence has developed a bespoke touring productions and one-off events to engage audiences’ participations all year round.

Speaking to Vaughn McKenzie as to what really the Block-Chain is all about he said: “A way of coordinating a mass of organisations or independent people to come to some shared conclusions or a system of mass coordination basically.”

And as to what role Block-Chain plays in the delivery of music he emphasized that “In the music industry there a lot of a lot of companies who all do some different process in the value chain, and coordinating how they all work together is very difficult without a standard system or a shared system and Block-Chain can potentially provide that infrastructure.”

The conference started around 4pm and ended with a networking drinks mini party at the Cloud Bar.

As this year’s Convergence draws to a close, the curtains would not be drawn without the performances of Canada’s own Jacques Greene, Lone Ft, alongside the likes of Konx-om-Pax, Pional, Éclair Fifi and Yves Tumor closing the last day of Convergence 2017 at Electric Brixton, this Saturday.

BY WILFRED CLARKE.