The new Musikmesse – first thoughts

This year’s Musikmesse adopted a brave new concept of enhanced B2B features while also turning into a consumer show. Did it work?….

You would expect a new pair of shoes to pinch a bit. Especially if you put them on backwards. 

This new show was definitely Musikmesse, the whiff of currywurst against a laid back jazz soundtrack provided your brain with the stimuli of familiarity, but nothing was where it was supposed to be. Which is fine and you have to embrace the new, but in swapping it with the location of Pro-Light and Sound it felt like a relegation of sorts. Which is, of course exactly what it is in terms of the two shows’ relative importance. Now, PL+S has the nice plaza with the fountains and Musikmesse….doesn’t. It felt like there was a hell of a lot more walking involved too, but that may be a temporary problem for visitors while they find their bearings.

The business hall in 11.1 was a very pleasant environment, but it was oh so quiet. Which is the exact point of it, of course, – a serene place to talk and do business. Perhaps it should have been an add-on feature all along. But if that’s the first place you land you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve either come to a series of seminars on sign language or that someone had just died in the room. Possibly it was Musikmesse.

Extract yourself from the peace and sanity of that into the floor below, which is noisier, more traditional Musikmesse territory, and it felt three times louder than normal. American torturers (sorry, “Enhanced Interrogators”) in Guantanamo employ a similar tactic I believe. Silence, and then Extreme Noise Terror, both in sense of the actual band and the officially sanctioned CIA phraseology, for maximum ‘degradation’.

I’m sure no-one is feeling degraded, just a little uncomfortable. But that may pass and no doubt the organiser will take on a ton of feedback from this year’s show in order to give the exhibitors what they want. Maybe that’s the mistake. Don’t listen to them. They don’t really know what they want except to get more for less. And in a couple of years when Musikmesse has either disappeared or been so scaled down as to be irrelevant, they will be clamouring for a big trade show again. Put money on it.

The consumers? I got the hell out of there before the vast majority of them turn up this weekend, which tells you all you need to know about how much we all really want a consumer show.

Those are the first thoughts. They might even be the last. It was Musikmesse but not as we know it. It’s new and will take some getting used to, but the question remains as to whether the trade will want to. I’m sure they won’t be the last changes it makes.