This morning, I wrote an editorial for the next issue of 5 Magazine about coping with a world without the Winter Music Conference. I logged their website and all of their social media, most of which hadn’t been updated with anything substantial in more than a year. Those pages are actually still open in several browser tabs.

Yet just one hour ago, a post appeared on the facebook page of the Winter Music Conference announcing this year’s program – just two weeks ahead of time. Reloading their homepage shows it’s been hastily updated. The WMC 2018 is on.

The post announces the 33rd Annual Winter Music Conference March 20-22 2018 at Faena Forum in Miami Beach – a shortened, 3 day conference in the middle of what is now the much more highly touted Miami Music Week.

This comes after several outlets – most notably Big Shot in this well-written piece by Darren Ressler – noted that all of the WMC social media were dead and there hadn’t been a word about this year’s conference well into March. A comment to that article from “Bill Kelly” – the same name as the WMC co-founder – claimed that Big Shot’s eulogy was premature:

The great thing about writing a eulogy is being able to read it and realize that you’re not dead. Excuse me while I put my new suit on; see ya’ll soon! WMC lives on… stay “real” tuned. ❤

 

All of this is highly strange. I can’t imagine anyone is going to buy a badge to a conference announced two weeks from now. In case you’re curious, badges are being sold for $195 in advance, and there’s not much of an “advance” period to buy them. They’re $249 at the door. Would you? Why would you?

And I wrote earlier today (hey, I might as well get some mileage out of this editorial before I trash it), the actual WMC part of what most people called “WMC” had little to do with the conference itself:

Only a fraction of people who said they were “going to WMC” were actually going to the conference itself. The type of people who would go to Miami in March to point tape recorders at a bunch of DJs talking in a conference room are mostly magazine writers, not other DJs. At a certain point, the “conference” part of WMC became increasingly anachronistic, almost a well-timed punchline. The “can’t miss” things happening in Miami in March were happening in nightclubs, not around long tables with bottles of chilled Poland Springs on them. We never bought a badge and were never actually invited to the conference itself. (Based on the price gouging that is as much a part of Winter in Miami as the music, we probably wouldn’t have if we were.)

 

The full post from Facebook:

Does this announcement change your plans? When was the last time our Miami people actually stepped foot inside the conference itself? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook.

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