Music Expo San Francisco 2024 - live and in person, once again
by Scott Jay
25th November 2024
The Music Expo 2024 poster
We built this city on rock & roll… and EDM… and hip-hop… and more…
Music Expo is over for another year - in fact, its 10th - and Loïc Maestracci is exhausted. It’s a good kind of exhaustion, he assures me on the phone from San Francisco, California where the summit has just finished a couple days’ prior, and it won’t be long before he’s going full-tilt again with his many side hustles and, most importantly, gearing up for next year’s edition. But in the meantime, we’re reflecting on the journey to today - the success of the just-completed festival marks the transition from the first to the second decade of the annual event, and Loïc wants to talk about the past, the present and the future of Music Expo.
This year’s Music Expo was held at Music City - a relatively new $20m San Francisco venue located in the Lower Polk district (near Nob Hill) which features a live venue, a recording studio, rehearsal rooms and is even the new home of the San Francisco Music Hall of Fame. Music Expo itself though is not really concerned with celebrating the live and loud wall of sound used by the Grateful Dead or the clear, crisp studio sound of Huey Lewis. Much as they might respect the popular music of the past, this is a forward-thinking day festival of ideas - where the next-generation of songwriters, producers and performers come to meld minds with some of the current-day heroes of the Bay Area scene and hone their craft - not to mention checking out some of the latest gear & tech on offer from the gathering’s many A-list sponsoring exhibitors.
Nearly 500 musicians and music-adjacents passed through the building with their laminates with VIPs attending a Q&A the evening before featuring John Cuniberti & Mark Needham, the actual day of event and the evening’s afterparty featuring a super energetic electro-Latin set from Chile’s Cigarbox Man.
Knee deep in the hoopla
Loïc Maestracci, founder of Music Expo
“San Francisco today is a music city. It’s a very thriving live music city,” Loïc states.
“There are three or four amazing festivals a year, including Outside Land, which is probably the second largest music festival in the United States, to Portola, which is an incredible EDM festival. All the major acts come to the Bay Area, when they tour. So from a live perspective, it's a major stop, and then you have a lot of small venues too. The local scene is re-emerging, I would say. There are a lot of underground musicians, more on the rock, hip-hop, and Latin side, that are really starting to make some noise,” he excitedly explains. Loïc is a fan of music, as well as a musician/producer himself, so he knows what it’s like to be “in the trenches”.
It’s the local scene that very much inspired the creation of Music Expo in the first place of course.
“I wished there was more of a support network, and this is why Music Expo is so critical to the local ecosystem,” Loïc intones.
“I always say it's a music event for musicians by musicians - so I’ve always tried to do it at a music venue,” he explains. “When we did the first one 10 years ago it was at the Chapel, which is a music venue in the Mission District, and then we migrated to SAE Expression College, which is an audio engineering school in Maryville. They were great spots!” he continues.
Like a rock band that was on the cusp of making it big, Music Expo then toured around the USA too - running events in Nashville, Boston and Miami at various points, taking full advantage of the localized music scenes in those cities to put on the best possible programmes. But in the end, all roads led back to The City by the Bay.
The most recent Music Expo was the first “in-person” event for several years. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it either had to end, or go virtual for a while, and thankfully Loïc and his team were resilient enough to go with the latter option. Despite the success of the online variants of the fest, nothing beats person-to-person contact, and Loïc could not be happier with how it turned out.
Music Expo 2024 attendees at a session
“Things changed with Covid. I decided to bring it back to San Francisco, and I started looking for venues even when we were doing the Expo online,” Loïc says, stoically. “I visited about a dozen venues in the Bay Area, music venues, there are a couple that were on the short list, and then I decided Music City was the one, because it had the right combination of being central, but also having multiple rooms. Instead of having one main room and then maybe a lobby, you had multiple stages, you had rehearsal spaces across three floors,” states Loïc as he explains the benefits of the new venue.
“They have 20 rehearsal spaces that are about 100 square feet, which we reserved for the exhibitors. The main stage is where we had our panels, and then we used the smaller stages for workshops, demonstrations, and more in-depth hands-on sessions. One of those rooms hosted Neumann, and Neumann built a 7.1.4 mobile Atmos rig so that all the attendees could experience an Atmos studio on the day,” he comments.
"It's not lost on me that it's through the support of our superb partners that we were able to come back to an in-person show. Without Focusrite and their family of brands, Kali Audio, Audigo Labs, Advanced Systems Group and of course Neumann, who knows where we'd be right now?" Loïc wonders aloud, rather gratefully.
We just want to dance here
How does Music Expo slot into a world where The NAMM Show, AES, The Recording Academy and tonnes of other trade organizations all run their own shows and programmes across the year in a variety of locations around the world? There are several keys to the success of Music Expo - hyperlocality, accessibility and also diversity. The programming is incredibly forward-looking as well and reflects a music industry in flux in the 21st century.
“The AES (Audio Engineering Society) is made up of experienced, often older professionals. But with Music Expo, our core is really 24-35 year-olds, 49.6% of our attendees this year - nearly half - were between 24, 25 and 34 years old. Our attendees this year were also at least 24% women, and I don't want to tell you that the rest were male, because we had a lot of non-binary people, because it's San Francisco after all, and that demographic is very well represented at Music Expo! So in terms of youth and demographic - we're very different.”
And that’s not necessarily a diss on the venerable AES, who still have an important role in the pro audio community - or any other organizations that put on industry events in the Bay Area for that matter - as Loïc is involved with most of them in some capacity, and yet still finds the time and the niche to put on Music Expo.
“The AES San Francisco Section is very vibrant, and this is because since I have became the chair of AES SF section, our committee kicks ass” he laughs. “ I am the chair of the local section, and we used to do two or three events a year. Last year we did 10, so between the AES San Francisco section, the Recording Academy’s SF chapter, and now Music Expo, and many other events, you know, it's clearly an effusion of the (music and pro audio) industry here in San Francisco,” he continues.
“The second big thing is the programming, we touch on music production, songwriting, artist development, marketing, distribution, and DJing - where AES is really about mixing, mastering, audio technology, standardization - ‘just’ audio engineering is really where they're about.
We’re covering an area that AES is not necessarily addressing, because that's not their mandate,” Loïc justifies.
Marconi plays the mamba
Loïc is keen to give me the details of the many topics his panels and workshops covered.
“When you do an annual event, and even though we had a gap of a few years, you don't want to bring the same topics over and over again. So you can take a new angle to stuff, but there's so many things that have changed since last time we had a physical event here,” he states assertively.
“To give you some examples: first, Immersive Audio. through the folks at Dolby, Apple & Tidal, etc, I mean you name it - it has exploded. More gear became available, more usage has become available, so clearly immersive audio was quickly a topic that I had to pick,” he notes.
“And I thought, look, we have Dolby (here) in town, and Dolby has been a part of Music Expo before. We have a couple of manufacturers who can power this type of equipment, and we have a lot of talent that is Bay Area based. [Working Class Audio podcast host] Matt Boudreau, who mixes in Atmos, Michael Romanowsky, who won the last Immersive Audio Grammy, and Leslie Ann Jones, who's the musical director at Luke Skywalker Ranch are all Bay-area based,” Loïc observed. All of them were booked to appear at Music Expo 2024 in one form or another.
Leslie Ann Jones and Michael Romanowski conduct a session at Music Expo 2024
“Second - there's a lot of questions about generative AI. We wanted to make sure we talked about it for music creation, but also for everything associated with that, because we don't want to replace the art of making music completely with AI. For example, how can you get an artist quicker to an idea? Or maybe do things that they don't want to do, like create artwork, creating EPKs, promotional-type stuff. So there's a lot of things that I wanted to address this way, to really help artists harness the power of AI to help create more or better,” Loïc remarks.
And then third, in terms of technology, there's been a lot of discussion about VR and AR. Apple Vision Pro came out this year. The Quest is getting a lot of traction. And so we had a couple of panels, especially on gaming, how to leverage those technologies, not just to create music, but to distribute music, and what type of new experiences you can build,” he concludes.
Silicon Valley is not far from San Francisco of course and there are a load of tech companies building these products from the ground up right in their proverbial back yard, so if there were a place to cover these sorts of tech advances in, this is it.
Joi Rhones discusses practical marketing for artists at Music Expo 2024
“Dolby brought in a Mercedes that was Dolby Atmos ready, so people were able to also experience Atmos within a car, in the context of two consumer experiences and one professional experience with the Neumann room. So I can tell you that all 490 attendees got a chance to experience immersive audio at least once, so that's clearly a highlight,” he says happily.
“There was a great songwriting session with Jai Josefs, it was over packed, people were spilling out into the hallway. That was a highlight, and meeting someone with such a mastery of songwriting and really dropping gems, that blows your mind. Although we need to expand that next year to fit more people in!” he says with a slight note of apology in his voice.
“Another highlight was our first session - Otis McDonald, and some of the tricks he presented, he's very popular on YouTube, he has a channel where he breaks down his workflow, and his session was called Fast and Furious Workflow, and for good reason, because he's capable of coming up with an idea very quickly by chopping samples using Serato. It was amazing.” recalls Loïc.
Cigarbox Man performs at Music Expo 2024
It wouldn’t be a music and pro audio show without a barnstorming afterparty, and Cigarbox Man brought the goods.
“One of the immersive sessions - called Production for Immersive Audio, was led by Nahuel Bronzini, who's a two-time Grammy® award-winning mixing engineer, producer and arranger, and an artist called Cigarbox Man. They both worked together over the last couple of years, so I asked Felipe [Cigarbox Man], would you be down to perform at the afterparty? And they said, absolutely, we're down. It was a very electric, very electric performance, mixing psychedelic rock with electronic music.It was a great way to close the night, but man, I was exhausted,” laughs Loïc.
Great, you’re thinking. I live in the Bay Area, or I want an excuse to visit! Why Music Expo? Loïc’s pitch to you for next year is a pretty simple one.
“I'm a marketer by day, and I'm a musician by night. You know, I worked for media & tech companies for almost 20 years, started my own company, worked in the digital music distribution side, mobile content side, and then recently - I mean for the previous 10 years I worked for big companies such as Samsung & Twitter. My background is global consumer marketing. At night I produce music under the name of Iguazúl. I’ve released two EPs, and really the reason I released those two EPs is because I was taking my own medicine.
Music Expo was originally meant to inspire people to finish their ideas, and to turn a hobby into something a bit more professional. And eventually, well, I cannot be preaching people to finish their own projects and not do the same with my own.”
“So this is what Music Expo is - if you're interested in the art of making music, perhaps you're a singer-songwriter, or maybe you produce your own music, you're a musician, or you mix, or you're on the engineering side, so you mix and master, or you're a studio owner - you come to Music Expo because the wealth of education is absolutely incredible. You could spend hours and days watching YouTube videos, and you will probably get entertainment, but not necessarily education out of it. You come to Music Expo and it's going to be transformative from an educational perspective.
But the second aspect is if you're in the industry, you need to come, because for a day this is where everybody in the Bay Area is going to get together. And it's a fantastic way to network with people like yourself. Especially after Covid, maybe you've been isolated in your studio or at home, this is going to be a great way to meet people like yourself,” Loïc intones with a passion in his voice.
Loïc Maestracci & Otis Macdonald - Music Partnerships with Tech Companies workshop, Music Expo 2024
“You're going to meet 500+ music makers for a day, and you'll be able to maybe meet customers, collaborators, partners, you name it. People who are going to enable your music creation,” he finishes, with the unsaid recognition that ultimately, for the sorts of people who have or will attend Music Expo, music creation is the most important thing in the world.
For more information on Music Expo please visit : https://www.musicexpo.co
