MidemNet 2009 Liveblog: Serving artists, serving fans

Next up at MidemNet it's a session titled 'Serving Artists, Serving Fans', which I'm hoping will turn into a discussion of who manages the deeper relationships between artists and fans in the future – labels, or the artists themselves (or their managers).We have Bryan Calhoun from SoundExchange, Tim Clark from ie:music, Marcel Engh from Sony Music Europe and its SBX joint venture branding agency, David Schulhof from Evergreen Copyrights, Kenny Gates from PIAS Entertainment, and Martin Thornkvist from Songs I With I Had Written / The Swedish Model.Kicking off with Calhoun, who's worked as a new media advisor to Kanye West. What's he been doing? “Really it's Kanye, quite frankly, he's been very active in communicating to his fans through a blog,” he says. He's right – Kanye writes a bunch of posts every day. “It's been a real outlet for him, and there was a period of time when he wasn't doing any interviews at all, so if you wanted to know what was going on with him, you had to go to the blog.”Calhoun says the important thing about Kanye's blog is that it's not just pushing his own music – he posts about cool stuff that he [...]