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Winter Music Conference | |
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Genre | Electronic music |
Dates | First three days of Miami Music Week (Last full week of March) |
Location(s) | Miami, Florida, United States |
Years active | 1985–present |
Founded by | Louis Possenti Bill Kelly |
Website | www |
The Winter Music Conference (WMC) is a week-long electronic music conference, held every March in Miami Beach, Florida, United States [1] since 1985. It is also known as the premiere platform for electronic dance music. The conference brings together professionals such as artists, DJs, record label representatives (A&R), producers, promoters, radio and the media for seminars and panel discussions. [1] Each year the WMC draws thousands of attendees from around the world. [1]
The Winter Music Conference was founded in 1985 by Louis Possenti and Bill Kelly. Held annually in Miami Beach, Florida. the Winter Music Conference, has hosted up to an estimated 100,000 people. [2] The first Winter Music Conference took place at the Fort Lauderdale Marriott during 19–21 February 1986. [3] There were approximately 80 dance music industry insiders in attendance. [4] Since its inception in 1986, the event festivities have moved down south, across Miami Beach and Downtown Miami.
The event commands a major international draw with around 38 percent of attendees coming from outside the United States. [5] The conference serves as a platform for many underground and indie artists from over 70 different countries who spend the conference at events and panels; it is also a medium used by several entrepreneurs and consumer electronic companies to present their businesses and technological developments. [5]
The WMC & The Recording Academy began in 1996 - a partnership presenting The Producers Forum, a gathering of legendary artists. [6] In 1999, Ultra Beach Music Festival, now known as Ultra Music Festival, became an event as part of Winter Music Conference, taking place on 13 March 1999. [7] Waxpoetics Magazine, JBL, and Stanton sponsored the first International Record Collectors Show in 2007. [5] The WMC 2009 introduced the first annual WMC VJ Challenge at The Miami Beach Resort & Spa with celebrity hosts, judges, and VJs from various parts of the world hosted by VJ Psyberpixie and Felix Sama. [6] This inaugural year of the competition resulted in Sergey Lobodln (Moscow, Russia), walking away with the top winner prize. [8]
Since 2008, the conference has received increasing competition from the International Music Summit taking place in Ibiza in May.
In 2010, the VJ Challenge was expanded into two areas of competition; Video Mixing and Audio/Visual Mixing. The 2010 VJ Challenge winners were AeonChild (Boulder, Colorado) in the video category and Eclectic Method (London/NYC) in the Audio/Visual category. [9] The Miami Beach Resort also received the performance of the RoboMusic Demo in which Funkstar De Luxe and RoboProfessor (Henrik Hautop Lund) create live interactive compositions of RoboMusic.
In 2011, for the first time, WMC and Ultra Music Festival split and took place during two completely separate weekends in March. This was "a gross inconsideration by the WMC for event planners worldwide and artist scheduling." according to Windish Agency booking agent Steve Goodgold. [3] 2014 was the last year that WMC lasted a total of ten days. [10] In 2015, WMC took place across the span of five days. [11] Following that, 2016 was the second time that Winter Music Conference took place apart from Ultra Music Festival, lasting only four days, 21–24 March. [12] Since then, other music conferences have come about including SXSW in Austin, Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE), and EDMbiz in Las Vegas, which takes place during Electric Daisy Carnival yearly.
On March 21, 2018, Ultra announced that it had acquired the WMC and the IDMAs. [13]
On March 9, 2020, it was announced that the 35th edition of the WMC, originally scheduled for March 16–19, would be rescheduled due to the Florida Governor's declaration of a public health emergency and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention's Interim Guidance regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. [14]
There are over 500 individual events during the week the conference takes place.[ citation needed ] In 2007, The New York Times named it "one of the most anticipated clubbing events in the country." [15]
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A major event during Winter Music Conference is the International Dance Music Awards (IDMAs). The IDMAs are an integral part of WMC generating over two million votes from music enthusiasts in 209 countries and territories every year to recognize and honor exceptional achievements in 57 award categories. [16]
The IDMAs have been held annually since the founding of the WMC in 1985, except for 2017. In 2018 they were held once again but winners were chosen by the WMC without public voting. 2019, marked the first public vote for the IDMAs since the WMC was bought out by Miami Music Week - the organisers of Ultra Music Festival. [17] [18]
Above & Beyond are an electronic music group consisting of English DJs Jono Grant, Tony McGuinness and Finnish DJ Paavo Siljamäki. Formed in 2000, they are the owners of London-based electronic dance music labels Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep, and also host a weekly radio show titled Group Therapy Radio. The trio has been consistently ranked among DJ Magazine's Top 100 DJs Poll, having placed at No. 6 in 2007, No. 4 in 2008 & 2009, No. 5 in 2010 & 2011, No. 51 in 2018, No. 22 in 2019, No. 19 in 2020, No. 21 in 2021, No. 30 in 2022, and most recently No. 40 in 2023.
Ultra Music Festival (UMF) is an annual outdoor electronic music festival that takes place during March in Miami, Florida, United States. The festival was founded in 1999 by Russell Faibisch and Alex Omes.
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ID&T is a Dutch entertainment and medium enterprise that was founded in the early 1990s. Their event Mysteryland is named the oldest electronic festival in the Netherlands, with later events like Trance Energy and Sensation. It operates many of the largest electronic dance music events in the world. They were also involved in the editions of Tomorrowland up until 2013.
A State of Trance is a Dutch trance radio show hosted by Armin van Buuren and co-producer Ruben de Ronde that first aired in June 2001. Currently, it is aired weekly every Thursday at 20:00 (CET) and 14:00 (EST). As of January 2021, ASOT is broadcast to more than 150 stations in 84 countries, and its weekly listener count surpassed 40 million.
Amnesia is a nightclub on the Spanish island of Ibiza. It opened in 1976 and won the title of Best Global Club in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011 at the IDMA Awards in Miami. The club is located close to the village of San Rafael on the highway between Sant Antoni de Portmany and Ibiza Town.
The International Dance Music Awards or IDMAs was an annual awards ceremony held in Miami Beach, Florida, United States as a major part of the Winter Music Conference. The awards were held every year from 1985 to 2020, except for 2017, when the conference was in the process of being purchased by Miami Music Week.
Electric Daisy Carnival, commonly known as EDC, is an electronic dance music festival organized by promoter and distributor Insomniac. The annual flagship event, EDC Las Vegas, is held in May at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and is currently the largest electronic dance music festival in North America.
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TomorrowWorld was an electronic music festival, held in the Atlanta metropolitan area within the town of Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. Held from 2013 to 2015, the festival was a spinoff of the Belgian festival Tomorrowland. The festival was owned by LiveStyle, Inc. and organized and produced by EDM promoter ID&T, a wholly owned subsidiary of LiveStyle. In its inaugural year, TomorrowWorld received a nomination for Best Music Event at the International Dance Music Awards. The festival did not return in 2016 due to the bankruptcy of SFX as well as the backlash event organizers received due to weather-related and logistical issues during the 2015 edition.
Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike are a Belgian–Greek DJ duo composed of brothers Dimitri Thivaios and Michael Thivaios. They were ranked No. 1 on DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs list in 2015 and 2019, and were ranked No. 2 in 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018,2020 and 2023.
Alejandro "Alex" Omes was an Argentine-born American nightlife impresario and concert promoter. In 1999, Omes and Russell Faibisch, his then-business partner, co-founded the Ultra Music Festival, an outdoor electronic music festival held annually in Miami, Florida. Since its founding, Ultra Music Festival has grown into one of the country's and the world's largest electronic dance music festivals. An estimated 400,000 people attended Ultra Music Festival over the course of two weekends in 2013, the highest number of attendees to date.
Miami Music Week (MMW) is a weeklong marathon of electronic dance music that takes place in Miami, Florida. During the last week of March, the event is attended by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world. In 2015, over 1,000 artists performed at over 260 events hosted at a myriad of venues across Miami. Venues include nightclubs, pools, boats, and pop-up spaces/venues in areas such as Wynwood, Downtown Miami, Miami Beach, and Little Haiti. Miami Music Week also leads up to the Ultra Music Festival, which is attended by 165,000 people over three days.
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