Coming soon via Latitude 45 Arts: accelerando.media. But, what is accelerando.media?
accelerando.media is a website designed to equip everyone in the musical ecosystem with the knowledge they need to facilitate and improve their online presence.
Last March, when COVID-19 became a reality and theatres and concert halls across the country and around the world started closing their doors, Barbara Scales, the founder and president of Latitude 45 Arts, was faced with a dilemma. Her artists were no longer able to travel, contracts were being cancelled and negotiations stopped. But Latitude 45 Arts was not alone with this dilemma.
Scales started setting up almost daily meetings with other agents, presenters, musicians and union leaders to see how they were dealing with the pandemic. These meetings became a casual working group, known as Midis musique, and it would continue to meet informally over the next three or four months and provided the impetus for accelerando.media.
When the Canada Council for the Arts announced its Digital Strategy Fund, Latitude 45 Arts applied for a grant with the goal of improving the digital literacy of the entire music sector. The aim was to equip Canadian musicians, agents, managers and presenters with basic knowledge about rights, platforms, distribution, metadata, monetisation so that they could ask the right questions before deciding to put music online. A common vocabulary was necessary, as was knowing what questions needed to be asked before putting music online and what the consequences could be if certain conditions were not respected.
The grant request was approved and Latitude 45 Arts set to work. People across the country were interviewed, a list of questions was compiled, experts were found and sixty plus web capsules answering questions such as “How do I distribute my music?”, “What is copyright?”, “What are synchronization rights?” and “What is metadata?” were filmed, in French and in English.
A bilingual website, accelerando.media, will be available with these capsules as well as a list of resources covering all of the topics covered in the web capsules and more. Users will be invited to ask questions and share best practices. Question and answer sessions with experts may be organized if there is demand. And, since accelerando.media is about getting music online, the website will have a Media Library page where artists will have the opportunity to show work that marries film/video and music in an innovative and artistically exciting way.
Stay tuned for the official launch of the accelerando.media website in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please contact Kees van Draanen at info@latitude45arts.com with any questions.