October 22, 2009

By By Gary Smith, Amsterdam

Day one of the 14th Amsterdam Dance Event, held for the first time on the Wednesday with a full day and evening program, provided solid proof that the event is thriving despite the economic downturn.

A mixture of geographic convenience and, according to many delegates, genuine value for money, saw the electronic music conference and clubbing event sold-out for the third year in succession.

"It has been sold-out for the last three weeks and since then we have had to turn down around 200 people even though we now also use the Dylan Hotel as an annexe," says GM and organizer Ricard Zijlma of Buma Cultuur. "I believe that the continued success of the event is down to a combination of the cost effectiveness, and the fact that we offer something for everyone."

He adds, "Yesterday [Wednesday] we concentrated on reflecting new trends in both the consumption and creation of music, Thursday and Friday cover a wide range of relevant topics and ADE Next on Saturday is all about involving the public. Then there's the night program, which attracts around 90,000 clubbers and features Carl Craig remixing the soundtrack to the Blair Witch Project in the Vondel Park on Saturday. There are also in-store appearances by both Tommie Sunshine and Richie Hawtin plus the screening of the documentary "Making Contakt," a film about the Minus label's 2008 tour."

Wednesday's daytime program featured Music Hack Day, a jam session for software developers with live demonstrations of software prototype development, and presentations of new technology by RjDj and Last FM. Interactive Emmy Award winner Andie Nordgren, a developer at RjDj, demonstrated the Reactive Music Player application for the iPhone, which allows listeners to interact with the music they are listening to.

"It's not for composing music as such," she said. "What we were trying to do was to hit the sweet spot where it's still listening to music but with the ability to affect the experience by introducing effects and cross rhythms."

Developer Matt Ogle of Last.fm admitted that the company's move to a subscription model in April this year for countries not covered by the company's license agreement - outside the U.K., U.S. and Germany - had been badly handled by the company, but that countries such as Holland now have more users than before the change.

"What we learned was that we didn't present our case correctly," he said. "We hadn't thought about showing the value of our place in a complex ecosystem where music is discovered and used, and as a result we were pilloried on blogs around the world."

Latest user figures from Last.fm show the service growing robustly in 2009 with 430 million 'scrobbles' or 711 per second and 35 million unique users per month. Scrobbling is reporting what you are listening to, which feeds into Last.fm's recommendation engine.

The official ADE opening Party at the Paradiso featured Simiam Mobile Disco (live) followed by Electronation featuring DJs from ViVA Music & Ovum Recordings with some excellent sets from Terry Toner, Steve Lawler, Benny Rodrigues & Darko Esser, Gregor Tresher, Josh Wink, D'julz and Tiefschwarz.

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