Recording - September 2016 - 18

As a longtime SXSW attendee, I've
been wanting to check out the Northside
Festival for a while, especially since it
happens on my home turf of New York
City (well, Brooklyn, which I think would
like to be its own thing). Last year I had
checked out a couple of the shows at
Northside, but this year I got a badge
and did serious roaming around.
Forgive me if in this report I keep drawing comparisons with South By South
West, but whether the Northside founders
admit it or not (I never asked them), I am
sure SXSW has served as a huge inspiration to them. After having attended SXSW
for almost ten years, I know it well. So it
was inevitable for me, while roaming

SXSW. They clock in at around 45 minutes, but by the time everyone is seated
and it starts, you are basically looking
at a quick 30-minute session with the
speakers. This is great for the short
attention span of today's young audiences and it keeps things moving swiftly, without a dull moment in the schedule. However, when the subject matter
happens to be very interesting/relevant
to you, that short time span ends up
becoming a limitation. You will
inevitably walk away with unanswered
questions.
I started checking out some Content
and Innovation panels on the second
day of the festival, at the Getty Images

One thing that I really loved about the
Northside vibe vs. SXSW is that people
are actually there to learn and to work.
Sure there are a lot of "plain" music-loving
concert-goers as well, and that's totally
fine, but walking the streets of
Williamsburg you could feel the neurons
storming in the air. The Northside crowd
(over 100,000 people) is a very smart,
attentive, forward-thinking, ambitious,
entrepreneurial crowd. These young people are walking around with pads and
pens, gadgets and coffee, and are obviously there to learn something, to interact,
to network. It's not just a spring-break vacation where people only want to get drunk
and party (as often happens in Austin).

Report and photos by Marc Urselli

New York's music and media fest
is a goldmine for recording musicians
around Brooklyn, to make comparisons
with my own experiences in Austin.
SXSW is almost two weeks long; it has
a Film festival and an Interactive section
as well as the Music portion, which is
slowly taking over the entire festival.
Northside-which, as the name implies,
happens on the north side of Brooklyn
(meaning mostly Williamsburg,
Greenpoint, East Williamsburg/Bushwick,
etc.)-is one week long and includes three
days of Content programming, two days
of Innovation programming, and four days
of Music programming. 2016 was the
seventh year for the Northside Festival
(Music was June 6-12), and as you can
imagine, it has grown into a force to be
reckoned with; Northside and CMJ are
the two largest yearly independent music
festivals in NYC.
Content and Innovation...
Northside's Content and Innovation
panels are much shorter than those at
18

RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2016

main stage at Nitehawk Cinema, and
proceeded to absorb more knowledge
on Thursday and Friday at the Fortune
Venture stage inside the Wythe Hotel.
Some of the panels were interesting.
However, especially during the
Innovation panels, the speakers did a lot
of plugging their own companies and
products. When that happens, my guard
goes up and makes me less interested
and more skeptical; everything starts to
feel like it's part of a marketing scheme
rather than a heartfelt discussion of the
issues at hand. Also, due to a lot of
cross-pollination, the lines between
Content and Innovation are quite blurry
and sometimes seem arbitrary.
Nevertheless, there is an invaluable
mass of information to be collected at
these panels, and I would encourage
any festivalgoer to take full advantage of
them. Northside claims 150 speakers
and 100 content creators were available
on site this year. That's huge!

If I could change two things about the
panels, I would make them one hour
long, and I would combine Content and
Innovation to make room for a few days
of Music panels. To me it was a bit disappointing that there were no Music panels
at all. Not only is music what interests me
the most, but I also think that a festival
with so many musicians in attendance
would greatly benefit from having panels
for that entire cross-section of the audience. Hopefully Northside will address
that in the coming years.
...and Music
Musically speaking, as you might imagine, the overarching music theme here is
"indie rock". There were about 400
bands performing this year! I remember
one year at SXSW when I counted the
number of bands from Brooklyn in the
schedule. It exceeded that of any other
city, even cities in Texas! That says a lot
about how much Brooklyn has to say, so

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2016