The music and sports industry certainly took center stage on day two of the inaugural All That Matters Online 2020 event. The day started off with a beautiful virtual showcase by Sound Australia, with Edwin Tong, Minister for Culture, Community and Youth coming on shortly after.
The event then saw Branded CEO Jasper Donat moderating a discussion with Wendy Ong, Tap Music President, Marc Perman, President at Perman Management Inc and Oana Ruxandra, EVP Business Development and Chief Digital Officer at Warner Music Group. The three shared insights on diversifying, collaborating, growing fan base online, building your brand as a new artist and connecting with fans. The conversation ended eloquently, with them throwing in a word of advice in following your passions, being kind and to focus on being respected as compared to being liked.
Another interesting conversation was the Marc Geiger interview with Ralph Simon, Chief Executive of Mobilium Global. Marc is a music executive, talent agent and entrepreneur. Marc was asked if he would see a trend of more gamers and gaming recording more music in the market, with the emergence of the music component in Twitch and Instagram. Marc said “Absolutely. Gaming and music have always been a natural fit since the very beginning. And then through the console era, music was broken through big-budget games for years. I think Twitch is the new MTV here for gamers worldwide it’s a huge important culture that the world doesn’t understand, music is a natural tie in for games and gamers. I think it’s just the beginning, there’s been a couple of performances inside fortnight with Marshmellow and Travis Scott.”
“Music and online gaming has alot farther to go and again its another series of network for artists to sink their teeth into because the gaming audience are very loyal and they’re communicative. They spend a lot of hours online. I think it’s going to explode and it’s going to be one the unifying platforms for east and west because gaming is already very crossover, it’s very global. We had Ninja up in Chicago in Lollapalooza and he was bigger than any other artist in terms of audience”, Geiger added.
Following after was a discussion on fan engagements behind close doors with David Burke, Managing Director & Head of Sales at VIVA Group, Sarah Wyse, General Manager at AFL and Joyee Biswas, Head of Sports Partnerships at Facebook. They were joined by CEO of MinerLabs, James Miner who moderated the session. They spoke on creating fan experiences that would last long after the doors are opened. One of the initiatives Facebook have been actively pursuing, as shared by Joyee is the “in-stream ads which run in videos in Facebook watch.” Others would include fan subscriptions in which “publishers can upgrade their fans into paying a recurring monthly fee” and the fan would have access to premium content. This is seen across football clubs in the English Premier League. Another is “paid online event which allows publishers to charge a fee against live streams”.
VIVA Group also launched a series of products for the fans to engage with the fighters when the pandemic cause television and off-air events to come to a halt. They launched ‘Come And Talk With The Fighters’, which “is a live engagement with the fighters. We build products around shadow box challenge, plank challenges. We did a range of other products like ‘guess the tattoo’. What we’ve now noticed is that more and more are now waiting on standby for us to get back on air.”
There was also the live and online session with Lim Teck Yin CEO of Sports Singapore and he was joined by Jasper Donat. Teck Yin was asked how has Sports Singapore weathered the storm of the pandemic and what are some of the initiatives they’ve introduced. The CEO replied “Well the industry is certainly down but we’ve been very clear that we want to be able to sustain jobs, sustain capabilities that has been built up over the years and what we have been doing really is working hand and glove with the other government agencies to be able to support industry with some of the budgetary measures that have been rolled out through out the course of this year and as we speak we are working on another resilience package and getting through the details of the support that would then be made available to the industry.”
“Most critically, jobs and capabilities cannot be alllowed to fall away. Particularly capabilites that have been wazing and running events, capabilities that have been fueling our high performance sports system in Singapore and capabilities that have enabled community participation. Conferences like Sport Matters, The World Fit Summit and Mass Participation World, these three important conferences that we’ve been hosting in Singapore all these years continue to be very important for the industry players to come together, share the lessons that they’ve been learning.”
“Technology is a big deal. It’s even more critical for us now that sports industry is able to transform with the help of technology. Moving forward, we have discussed earlier on that everything needs to be in future some form of blended event that enables us to reach a much wider audience.” Teck Yin detailed.
Overall, day two had its focus on music matters and how people and companies can leverage on platforms to continuously grow and even more so at a time in this pandemic. Once again, the All That Matters Online event provided great insight, learnings and a fresh perspective. The event continues tomorrow, heavily highlighting the eSports industry.
