NAMM 2014- State of the Industry
namm 2014 – Anaheim January 23-26
January 7, 2014, Joe Lamond presented an overview of NAMM and its upcoming show. The show takes thousands of people to make it happen and demonstrates new ideas, shares best practices, and offers an opportunity for the music merchants and industry to get together. The annual event has taken place for over 100 years.
The various products illustrate the passion and ingenuity within the trade as musicians, technology, and ideas come together. The show business model draws funds from the show to fund NAMM Foundation activities to promote music and education. The exhibits demonstrate the variety and diversity in the people, companies, and musical instruments.
The wide range of educators, talent, and technology span hand-crafted to mass-produced instruments and now include much in the way of electronics and various levels of software. Together, the attendees and exhibitors make, use, and sell music and sound reproduction and enhancement products.
The increasing use of technology is balanced by such items as the artisan drum sets that will be in use for decades. Some of the instruments and their underlying technologies have been around for millennia. In comparison, some of the high-tech products have an expected lifetime of less than a year, as users want the next generation as quickly as possible. There is still a lot of value in some of the old instruments, even with modern updates.
The breakthroughs in technology have enabled greater ease in recording and sharing music. Now, music can be easily mixed with other media and is finding other uses in more media and in films. GoPro is demonstrating a new camera for merging media and music in venues where the performer can project a point-of-view in sync with the music as it is being performed.
The show itself is growing with new categories including live audio, technology, and others. The advances in technology are highlighted with the Tech Awards on Friday. Important show tracks include education, social, connectivity, and networking as a part of the overall ecosystem for music.
As more technology gets integrated into music, music is available everywhere. Although this would seem to decrease the demand for live music, the numbers and sizes of tours is growing. Live concerts are a communal activity that area an antidote to the isolation that social media seem to engender. Live performances are an essential element in music. In a similar vein, acoustic instruments like strings are still growing in the market, especially in the educational areas in North America and China.
Simultaneously, the artists are looking at both analog and digital components to realize their visions. Digital doesn’t have the full answer as seen by the continuing demand for tube amps, but digital techniques will be useful and necessary supplements to the analog world due to the ability to generate effects and the faster overall speed of edits. In fact, it is likely that analog will grow faster than digital since the musicians like the fuller sounds from analog.
Further, performers will use more of a mix of digital and acoustic instruments. For example, drummers might have both types of drum kits for the broader range of sounds and effects possible than from just analog or digital. The unique qualities of a boutique manufacturer may balance the greater ease of use in a high-tech system, so there is room for both technologies.
Technology also enables new ways to collaborate and engage with other musicians. The potential to have a performance with musicians located around the world has already been shown, and the distance collaboration allows for more music to be created, recorded, and shared than any time in history. The role of music is fundamental to human life, so enabling more creation and easier distribution enhances our lives.
About 200-300 companies change at NAMM every year as trends and changes in industry force companies to adapt or fade from the picture. One trend is towards more hand-crafted drum sets, and the electronics continue to get smaller, faster, and cheaper, unless constrained by the physical packaging.
