Australia’s newest music industry event found its home in Melbourne this week. CHANGES was a music industry summit by day, and industry-showcase-and-adventures-on-Smith-Street-with-a-side-of-kebabs by night. In a spin to the typical conference format, CHANGES had zero panels. Instead they focused on small room workshops and masterclasses, as well as one-person keynotes by industry experts to let attendees get a deeper view on each topic.

CHANGES was run by the excellent folk at The Push, and Bolster was involved heavily through the graphic design, website, digital advertising and also popping up here and there on the event program.

Bolster‘s Director Alex Zaccaria opened the conference with an interactive keynote. We posed advertising trivia questions based on industry and Bolster stats, with attendees answering these with real-time polls using their mobile phones. For instance… How many metres of content does the average person scroll through daily on their phone? What percentage of festival ticket holders actually like said festival on Facebook? What percent of website banner ads booked for festivals and tours are actually ever displayed on a real screen to a real human? If you want to know the answers to those… chat to us ?

LNWY and IOHYOU hosted the CHANGES closing party at the Night Cat, with some pretty phenomenal music from Krakatau, ALTA and Billy Davis & The Good Lords. (If you haven’t heard of LNWY, it’s Bolster’s evergreen content outlet with Laneway Festival. I love it, and so should you.)

On a more personal note, I also ran a closed door workshop with Al Parkinson, hosted by Music Victoria. We had good chats around all things social media, marketing and helping artists get ahead.

Here’s to CHANGES 2019!

Photos: Sarah Chav