Conference | Solveig Whittle

10 Reasons Seattle Is Great For Indie Musicians

March 19, 2014 1 Comment

You’ve probably heard people talk about how if you’re “serious about your music career” you should move to Nashville or LA.

I’ve been thinking lately, however, about what makes my hometown of Seattle such a great incubator for talented musicians.

It’s not just the recent blockbuster success of (multi-category) Grammy winners Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. A lot of really great music and music production has come out of Seattle over the years. From the Kingsmen and Bing Crosby to Jimi Hendrix, the Sonics, Quincy Jones, Heart, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Queensryche, Mudhoney, Tingstad and Rumble, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Danny O’Keefe, Alice Stuart, and Kenny G all the way to current success stories like The Head and The Heart, Brandi Carlile, Blue Scholars, Shabbaz Palaces, Allen Stone, Kris Orlowski and Shelby Earl. (I’m not even counting Dave Matthews, although he does live here.)

Here are some of the special things about the Emerald City which make it a better environment than Nashville or LA in which to nurture a music career:

“Entertain, Inform, Be Useful – Or Be Forgotten”

November 2, 2012 2 Comments

This past Monday and Tuesday, I attended the second annual Seattle Interactive Conference, a mix of presentations, panel discussions, and performance art that centered around the theme of “Game-Changers” in the digital world. And on the third day I rested. My head, and apparently also David Shing’s hair, practically exploded from the firehose of information, insight and interaction at this conference. Interactive was the game, and #SIC2012 was definitely the place to be this week.

Presenters and panelists were a diverse mix: entrepreneurs, new media agency professionals, digital visionaries, musicians, venture capitalists, and big corporate marketing executives in the trenches executing on real life campaigns. Themes like mobile, storytelling, relationships, memes, disruptive technologies, the cloud, reinvention and, above all, clever humor, kept popping up like the undead.

“Attention is the new currency – entertain, inform, be useful – or be forgotten,” says David Shing (@shingy, AOL’s “Digital Prophet”, a reporter for Huffington Post, and also a musician, by the way). “Humor and creative presentation win every time,” echoed Ben Huh (@benhuh) of Cheezburger fame.