Land Of The Dinosaurs

After packing off its delegates on a Weekend World Cruise in 2010 for what may have sounded uncomfortably like a SAGA holiday to older ILMC regulars, the annual London-based conference’s 2011 theme goes a step further by seemingly promoting itself as a gathering for dinosaurs.

The theme for this year’s ILMC March 11-13 is “The Land That Time Forgot,” the title of a sci-fi novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs that was the basis for a film about a German WWI U-boat that somehow – hey, this is fiction – finds itself surfacing in a land inhabited by various dinosaurs, a word that’s since become common English usage for describing anything impracticably large, slow-moving, obsolete or bound for extinction.

It’s also a term that some (usually younger) music critics use to describe rock acts that have been around for decades and have apparently become too old to even be entitled to try to earn a living.

What connects the theme with the conference is that, if ILMC does have a problem, and given its success and standing it can hardly have much of one, it may be that younger people in the industry perceive it to be a place where mainly older people go.

The conference appears to have addressed this by introducing features such as “Meet The New Boss,” in which delegates vote for one of a list of industry youngsters to elect the gathering’s choice as the one most likely to rise all the way to the top of the game.

Working out if it’s been successful and whether the conference demographic is changing, particularly as far as age is concerned, is far from being an exact science.

ILMC figures show the total attendance for the last three years were 975 in 2008, 1,020 in 2009 and 1,050 in 2010. For each of those years there have been about 200 people attending their first ILMC, the so-called newbies. However, looking around the conference it doesn’t appear as if the average age of the delegates is coming down.

This year it will likely be easier to spot the old dinosaurs lumbering in the corner than the fledgling pterodactyls whooping and squawking their way around London’s Royal Gardens Hotel.

Chris Prosser, who runs ILMC’s PR and marketing, points out that many of the newbie intake may not necessarily be young. Rather than attracting more youthful delegates, it may just be drawing more older ones.

That doesn’t mean Jurassic scraps can’t be lively affairs, particularly when a panelist dating nearly as far back as the sexagenarian age threatens to attack another panelist with a broken bottle.

Unfortunately this happened behind the scenes and before the 2008 ticketing panel – OK, secondary ticketing panel – opened, but it’s doubtful anyone in the room didn’t notice the smouldering hostility that lingered throughout the discussion.

Viagogo chief Eric Baker was the man who considered himself lucky he didn’t become extinct. Jazz Summers was the one bearing his claws.

An ILMC insider described it as a “legendary spat,” but in the ensuing three years opinions have probably hardened and so the conference justifiably feels the subject is worth revisiting. They may end up scrapping onstage this time.

It probably wouldn’t take the secondary ticket-selling debate any further but we may learn more about both species and it would certainly have a crude entertainment value.

That’s not likely to be the case when it comes to discussing the global economy and the impact it’s having on the music business, mainly because ILMC isn’t the best economic barometer.

Two or three years ago, the pre-conference blurb was spouting about how the industry was coming out of recession, apparently without realising it’s not the recession itself that hurts. The hurt comes later when it’s time to pay back all the money that was borrowed to postpone the pain.

The economic snapshot shows unemployment is likely to rise and so is the rate of inflation and various stealth taxes, which means more people will have less money, and the money that they do have won’t be worth as much.

Anyone who doesn’t understand that or prefers not to accept it has already taken the first monster step toward extinction.

Promoters will stop making sky-high offers for bands because they will have to.