A Crowd Of Talking Shops

In what looks like a bid to imitate London buses, Germany’s three main live music business conferences all turn up at the same time.

C/O Pop organiser Fabian Gerhartz addresses a panel at this year's conference, which was in Cologne, Germany, Aug. 21-22.

If Popkomm were still around, four of them would be squeezed into the space of four weeks. Recent attendance figures suggest that C/O Pop, Berlin Music Week and Reeperbahn are perfectly capable of competing and surviving. C/O Pop, which was in Cologne Aug. 21-22, usually attracts 1,000 trade delegates, Berlin Music Week Sept. 3-7 has been known to do double that, while last year’s Reeperbahn Campus attracted close to 3,000.

This year’s C/O Pop speakers included Dom Hodge (FRUKT), Zoe Stainsby (Coca Cola), Sat Bisla (A & R Worldwide), Greg Sato (Levi’s), Nadine Strothmann (Jägermeister), Selcuk Erdogan (Vevo), Christof Elling House (City Slang), and Elsita Meyer-Brandt (Eventbrite).

This year’s gathering attracted more than 900 delegates. Reeperbahn, which started in 2006, has grown into one of the biggest live music pow-wows, rivaling longer-running events such as Eurosonic Noorderslag in The Netherlands and the UK’s International Live Music Conference.

The speakers at this year’s Reeperbahn will include ILMC chief and former IQ editor Greg Parmley, Der Spiegel online editor Ole Reissman, and Correctiv editor in chief David Schraven, reflecting the fact that many of this year’s panels deal with the relationship between music and media.