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How Dropbox Is Changing The Music Business

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Dropbox will be joining the ranks of Universal Music Group, Nielsen Music, Pandora, United Talent Agency and other influential entertainment companies as a sponsor and participant at upcoming music conferences.

The file-sharing service will be sponsoring the Awards Luncheon at Music Biz 2016, a national conference run by the Music Business Association that takes place this May 16 to 18 in Nashville. In addition, Chris Barton, Head of Mobile Operator Business Development at Dropbox and Cofounder and Board Member of Shazam, will be part of a keynote panel at Musexpo, a talent-focused conference run by A&R Worldwide that takes place next week in Los Angeles. These partnerships are reflective both of Dropbox’s mission to expand its reach in creative industries and of the music industry’s recruitment of technology companies to help brainstorm innovative solutions for its own future.

"We frequently hear from the creative community that Dropbox is core to their creative process and their platform of choice for collaborating with others,” says Dropbox Brand Marketing Manager Liz Armistead. "Sponsoring the Music Biz conference is an opportunity for us to hear more from professionals in the music industry and share best practices for working smarter." While Barton will be speaking primarily on behalf of Shazam at Musexpo, one could infer that his insight into technology’s impact on the music business has contributed to Dropbox’s overall expansion into the creative world.

Dropbox already boasts an impressive record on the festival and conference circuit this year, hosting panels on collaboration and the creative process at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Dropbox Podcast Studio at SXSW, and participation in Musexpo and Music Biz will round out its presence across all entertainment sectors. In fact, Dropbox’s newfound positioning as a tool for media professionals comes at a time when the company is rapidly expanding its enterprise presence as a whole, adding as many as 25,000 new business users per quarter. On a higher level, the enterprise collaboration market is forecast to grow from $47.3 billion in 2014 to $70.61 billion in 2019, and will likely see particular growth in creative industries as collaborative teams grow in both influence and size.

Like music conferences themselves, Dropbox has served as a key convergence point for music professionals in recent history, from artists and producers to publishers and curators. Online lifestyle publication NEST HQ releases its weekly curation of free downloads via Dropbox, while music podcasters and producers like Hrishikesh Hirway and Ducky use the service to exchange stems for collaborations and remixes. Other common use cases of Dropbox in music include sending contest submissions and storing press shots, promo links and other assets.

It is important to note, however, that Dropbox is not rolling out any product features tailored specifically to the music industry, and that such previous attempts have failed, such as its short-lived integration with SoundCloud. Spinoff applications targeted at music lovers, such as Jukebox, have also not taken off as quickly as other music apps. A focus on conferences suggests Dropbox’s dedication to cultivating ideas, not just products, and perhaps provides a model for technology companies seeking a more empathetic approach to partnerships with the music business. In fact, few other technology companies have built campaigns around musicians or had major presences at music conferences, aside from Apple (with its series of films for Apple Music), Microsoft (with its Music x Technology series) and GoPro (with its sponsorship of the 2015 Sónar Festival).

Along with Dropbox’s sponsorship, Music Biz 2016 is making other strides to highlight the importance of brands in the music industry, most notably through its inaugural Branding and Strategic Partnerships Summit. Even this summit, however, suggests that the industry’s understanding of “brand partnership” is still limited to B2C initiatives, rather than B2B. The headlining panel—featuring Afdhel Aziz, Director of Absolut Labs, and Joe Belliotti, Director of Global Entertainment Marketing at Coca-Cola—will be run entirely by consumer-facing refreshment companies, while other themes throughout the summit include cultural marketing and leveraging social metrics and other fan insights to build the best campaigns. Dropbox stands out as one of the few companies looking specifically to economize B2B transactions for music professionals as well.

It is also interesting to point out that just three years ago, the Music Business Association had a strikingly different name: the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM). Founded in 1958, NARM was designed to focus on the wholesale, physical distribution systems that dominated the industry at the time. It was only in October 2013 that the organization changed its name and pivoted from simply a merchandising association into an accurate representation of the industry as a whole, including publishers, startups, adjacent brands and even music business students, and more recently technology companies.

“Our partnership with Dropbox underscores the future direction of Music Biz, and of the music industry at large,” says Music Business Association President James Donio. "We want to bring diverse companies into our forum because there are untapped opportunities, relationships and deals that emerge from all these people in the commerce, creative and technology sectors coming together."

Indeed, the best music conferences serve as a nexus of ideas among otherwise fragmented sectors in the industry, including artists, publishers, label executives, entrepreneurs and both physical and digital distributors. With the digitization of music formats, best practices in the business will necessitate new partnerships between music and technology sectors as well. On one hand, music companies will have to embrace technology earlier in the adoption cycle in order for their business models to remain agile; on the other hand, technology companies will need to prove their utility to creators in order to stay culturally relevant. For both players, speaking up at conferences is perhaps the best place to start.