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:
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:
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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