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| IODA's Initiative at WOMEX 2006 The Independent Online Distribution Alliance founder and CEO Kevin Arnold addressed the WOMEX 06 conference in Seville, Spain, with a presentation entitled "Crossing Borders: International Music Discovery in the Digital Marketplace". The presentation examines the opportunities and challenges of marketing the diverse landscape of music from around the world to the new global, digital audience. As the digital music marketplace has come of age in these first years of the new millennia, it has brought great promise to the creators and proponents of independent and niche music across the globe. The unlimited shelf space of online music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, Napster and the like has freed artists and labels of the distribution constraints and territorial limitations that create barriers for reaching potential fans. Yet many of the same cultural barriers that have traditionally stood in the way of creating a global marketplace have carried over into the digital world. Nearly 20 years after the "World Music" genre was first defined as a way to classify non-Western music, WOMEX 2006 provides an appropriate context in which to examine the challenges that still exist in discovering music from outside of one's cultural comfort zone. IODA prides itself in its position as the leading digital distributor of world music and counts the genre's top labels among its clients, including World Music Network, Wrasse, Sterns, World Connection, and World Village. Its diverse catalog offers tracks from Seu Jorge, Fela Kuti, Femi Kuti, Rachid Taha, Salif Keita, Baaba Maal, Mariza, Orchestra Baobab, Sara Travers, Tinariwen, Boubacar Traoré, and also includes the World Music Networks' acclaimed Rough Guide compilation series. Yet, as IODA's catalog has grown in the past several years it has also come to include a vast collection of international repertoire that falls beyond the traditional scope of what the world music genre represents, and this music often finds itself under- and mis-represented in the standard genre discovery hierarchies commonly employed by digital music retailers. Arnold's presentation reviews the current state of digital music discovery tools and systems with a focus on the world music genre, and proposes a simple, technology-based regional browse and filtering solution which uses the inherent territory and location data of artists and labels to increase discoverability across all styles of music in the global landscape. This type of regional filtering system can easily and quickly be integrated into the existing discovery platforms employed by most digital music retailers today, using existing territory and location data sources. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |