Music 2.0: Tools + Tech for Musicians, Marketers + Managers

I went to a music conference last night, Music 2.0 that had an impressive turn out of musicians, managers, music tech people, bloggers, students, and I'm sure plenty of others. It was really well organized by Charles McEnerney of Well Rounded Radio and Trish Fontanilla. I always enjoy going to these events where everyone involved in music in Boston get together. It honestly makes me think that these Boston people are going to be the ones that discover a way for the music industry to make money again, or come up with a new strategy, and that just warms my heart. There were lots of great presentations last night but here are a few I'd like to share that can be used right away. Sorry in advance if I botch any details. More after the jump.

Tourfilter www.tourfilter.com
A really smart website that allows you to get e-mails about any band that is touring in your area. It's exactly what I need because I hate missing bands simply because I forgot to check concert listings. It also comes with many more handy features like sorting by city (60 cities are available) and gives recommendations for other bands you might be interested in. Unlike a lot of other concert aggregators who only pull data from certain venues, this one gets them all from super small to the big arenas. Tourfilter is also have an impressively large artist database. Really well done. I basically spent an entire day messing around with this and adding bands, now my calender tells me that I have about 10 concerts to choose from every night of the week all the way through June. Oh, you can also export the calender to google or ical calenders. Amazing.

MoonToast www.moontoast.com/
One of the best presentations was from Marcus Whitney, CTO and Co-Founder of Moon Toast. He made a very convincing argument that artists who use Moon Toast as a selling platform actually make money. The artist/band pays a fee for the service and they get all sorts of handy and easy to use ways to sell your music. It can be embedded in websites and even on facebook which I thought was especially cool.

Ryan of RSL Blog and Matt of DysonSound (watch a video of his talk here) did a great job representing music bloggers. Both of their talks really boiled down to "we do this because we love music and we've made valuable connections with people through it." Amen to that.

I also discovered that I really like Notch Sessions Beer and Bear Flag Wine and that I always manage to pick the weirdest flavored Vitamin Water. They made great sponsors.

It was a really great event, got to meet some cool folks, and I can't wait to do it again. Check out the list of presenters here. You can read a succint review of all the presenters here from Georgy Cohen.A lot were really interesting but still in the early stages, so I'll be looking forward to see how they develop.