During the first week of the Spring semester, nine graduate and undergraduate students from Columbia’s AEMM Department, along with faculty advisors Walter Dale and Carolyn Albritton, joined thousands of music industry professionals at the MIDEM conference in Cannes, France.  MIDEM is the largest music market in the world, providing opportunities to connect artists, labels, distributors, and other industry professionals.

The trip to MIDEM was the culmination of a five-week fall semester course designed around the conference. Students chose four projects to shop at MIDEM, including H2, a hip hop act; the rock group Light FM; Larry Heard, an icon in the house music scene; and folk artist Jay Mathes. Most of the class was spent developing marketing materials for each project, researching the companies that would be attending MIDEM, attempting to schedule advance appointments, and creating a AEMM MIDEM web page <www.aemmp.colum.edu/midem> to market the projects.

This marks the fourth year that students from the AEMM Department attended MIDEM. Due to Columbia’s past success at the conference, the MIDEM organization gave Columbia a booth at the conference, providing students with additional opportunities to successfully present their artists to the industry. All of the artists represented by the students have generated interest through the conference; they each received a contact list of interested parties, which Dale believes will result in future licensing agreements. “This was a very hard working group,” says Dale. Albritton agrees, adding that the students “presented their artists extremely well. They were very excited about the opportunity and did an excellent job.”

Says graduate student Tara Watkins of the trip, “the MIDEM conference was one of the most valuable experiences that Columbia has provided me. It opened the door into an amazing aspect of the industry.”

Columbia has paved the way for more students to learn from the MIDEM experience. “Our participation in the past has generated interest by other universities,” states Dale. While at MIDEM, Dale and Albritton met with representatives from New York University who are considering bringing NYU students to MIDEM next year. “They were referred to us because of our success at MIDEM over the last four years.”