Northside Festival has come a long way since its founding almost a decade ago, L Magazine’s sub-CMJ (or sub-sub-SXSW) music fest taking place in venues in Williamsburg & Greenpoint (QRO recap of inaugural year). L Magazine and CMJ are no more, but Northside has since expanded significantly with its Innovation portion, featuring talks on the music industry, tech, and much more.
However, Innovation has come to overshadow Music more & more (such as a music badge costing around $70 – Innovation around $1,000). This year also didn’t see any of the big outdoor McCarren Park shows of years past, either free or ticketed, a major loss on the big-name front. But the festival was still a chance to scour the streets of Brooklyn (and stops on the L train) for new music in small places.
AWAL talks @ Brooklyn Brewery
Click image for full gallery – Ted Chase
It was really impossible to avoid the Innovation talks at Northside ’18, considering that’s where the money was, but at least this one was about the music industry – and free beer & pizza, which was what was most important.
These talks at Brooklyn Brewery, sponsored by AWAL, including ‘I’m My Own Label’ by independent artists such as VERITE, but also YouTube introducing their new music streaming service. While the talk seemed to treat this new competitor to the likes of Pandora and Spotify as the second coming, that’s to be expected, and it does actually seem to be pretty impressive, utilizing YouTube’s vast catalogue of content. The Q&A portion seemed to all be self-described “independent artists” asking how to get their music noticed.
The free beer stopped during the talk, prompting your correspondent to want it all to hurry up, but afterwards was not only more beer, but also tons of free pizza.
