The last meeting of Digital Music Los Angeles was designed to be a speed-networking event.  Since this is the newer of our two meet up groups, and is constantly expanding, we wanted the members to make as many connections as possible.  We're aiming to form a tight-knit community of music industry professionals under the DMLA umbrella, which will provide valuable business leads to all of the members involved.  We're hoping the people who attended made plenty of new connections, which not only makes them want to come back next time, but also bring their friends and colleagues along with them. <!--more-->We would like to thank networking MC Laurel Kaufman ( http://www.ak-cg.com/) as well as Ann Murray ( http://www.zombiegato.com), who has been helping build Digital Music LA since day 1.

We had a tremendously successful Digital Music NY July event.  We want to thank first and foremost our exceptional co-hosts for this event: Women In Music (sign up at www.womeninmusic.org) and board members board members Evangelia Livanos, Stephanie Chall and Hadley Poole.  They helped organize an amazing panel of the "Leading Ladies in Music," and also helped us draw a record crowd with their promotional efforts.
 
The panel included a discussion and Q&A with four senior women in the music industry, each one a pioneer in her own way.  It wasn't about making a big deal that these women are so powerful, but rather that they happen to have powerful jobs and ARE women.  On top of giving practical advice that the audience could put to good use for their own careers during the panel, some of the panelists also stayed after to talk one-on-one with members of the audience who had further questions.  Samantha Cox, Exec. Director of Writer Publisher Relations at BMI, even took CDs from every single artist who approached her during the event!

 The second Digital Music LA event took place on Tuesday. It was a pretty lively crowd of 75 including industry professionals from labels, PR/marketing agencies, managers and professional artists.   Announcements included from Bluehaze on creating fan music apps on a revenue sharing basis and a quick talk by the artist MYSELF (who also performed) on how he built a business around, well, himself.   

We saw some great feedback on Twitter (follow us at @digitalmusicla and hashtag #DMLA - check out the widge on the right) and even heard about a new music app development company, Sumobox being "spawned," in the words of the founder, as a result of conversations at our May event about.   Needless to say, we'll look forward to seeing their first demos soon. 

Over 125 representing a diverse array of music industry professionals joined Digital Music NY for the monthly business networking meet up on June 22nd. We will be posting more pictures as well as further information on the next event at www.playthemusic.biz and in the Musicdish.net newsletter. If you’re in the Los Angeles area this week, we invite you to join us for the Digital Music LA event, which will be held June 29th at 6:30 PM at the Air Conditioned Supper Club in Venice, CA.

As always, attendees of the Digital Music NY event took a few minutes to make their news announcements to the crowd including announcements from uPlaya, Rockethub, Musaic Management, Caral Lynn Hall and Dave Ahl.  Here's a quick summary of the announcements and Q&A presentation on music in China.

Zimbalam to announced that the new Zimbalam Backstage real-time CRM system and fully intergrated Zimbalam player and Facebook Widget are now live for all users (we previously did post about the CRM system).   The integrated distribution and marketing system gives artists a huge advantage in selling music by integrating personalized purchase links in the player (Zimbalam automatically suggests the best music online store in the player based on the listener’s location).

The Zimbalam Backstage CRM system provides data that shows what is working best for streaming and purchase referrals.  Real-time sales data from participating stores like iTunes gives the ability to understand the daily, weekly and monthly progression of sales and precisely analyze day-to-day earnings each quarter.   

Artists can also customize the Zimbalam player to create an album like experience with the entire discography available in a single player.  The player also acts as a marketing widget for viral distribution on social networks.  There’s also a special Zimbalam Facebook widget player is also the only Facebook player featuring direct purchase links to the major online stores.  

Other player features including the following: