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A hometown effort to showcase bold new music

Yellow Phone Music Conference
Multiple Venues
Milwaukee, WI
October 1, 2011

The Town Monster

Kate Diaz

Jimmy At the Prom

Story and photos by Jennifer Bronenkant

The organizers of the Yellow Phone Music Conference attempted to emulate the early days of Austin's SxSW Music Conference by holding a three day event featuring panels and mentoring sessions with prominent music insiders along with live music around downtown Milwaukee. While SxSW has grown to a massive event that now features film and interactive along with music, Yellow Phone concentrated only on the music business. Their goal was to bring together unsigned acts with leaders of the music industry.

Panels discussing a wide variety of industry topics were held at the Intercontinental Hotel over two days and included national industry leaders from all aspects of the business including talent management, production, public relations and law.

The Artist Showcase was held on Friday and Saturday nights at The Irish Pub, Turner Hall Ballroom, Milwaukee Ale House, Red Rock Saloon and MOCT. It was a great opportunity to see quality bands of various genres at the bargain price of $20 for admittance to all venues which included a shuttle between places.

I was able to catch a wide variety of music from singer/songwriter Kate Diaz, heavy metal from The Black Saints and an amazing indy rock set by The Town Monster among others. Unfortunately, in every place I went, there were sparse crowds there to enjoy the music. I saw bands playing to as few as a dozen people at Turner Hall up to a few dozen at MOCT.

It was disappointing to see such small support for the first year of this ambitious event. Maybe this was partly due to the fact that it was competing with a huge sports weekend with the Brewers in the playoffs and a Badgers home game. Milwaukee will hopefully take advantage of this opportunity to sample a wide variety of new music at next year's event.