Insomniac Events’ Post

Transcript

Hi, hi, hi. Hello. I'm Joe Wiseman. I'm the director and head of Insomniac Music Group II, Insomniac Music Group Studios. Insomniac launched the Discovery Project in 2013 around EDC Las Vegas. It was created to serve as a platform for up and coming producers, deejays to be heard, listen to and showcased at the festival. My name is Lauren, I am a brand manager here at Insomniac, and I also help run Discovery Project for all of our major festivals, including EDC. We launch a contest on our socials and then we allow a four week submission period for you to enter with an original unreleased track as well as a 30 minute mix for us to listen to. So for EDC specifically, we get thousands of submissions every year. With that, we compile all of the submissions after the four week period closes. And we make a top list to deliver to our guest judges to review, and they actually do pick the winner for the contest. Some recent guest judges that we've had come on board for Discovery Project are Dylan Francis, Alice in Wonderland, Zomboy, Valentino Khan, Armin Van Buren, and we're excited to bring on even more artists who are playing at our festivals to participate in judging who we think is next. One of the biggest challenges we face when we're going through submissions for Discovery Project is that sometimes we do receive tracks that are not unreleased and not unsigned. And unfortunately some of those are really dope and we would love to work with those artists, but because we do have those guidelines for the program, we have to disqualify them. So my biggest disappointment in that is just that there's so many artists that we want to work with and we don't get to. We listen to every single song that gets submitted. The songs do have to be unreleased. Not signed to any labels and the mixes do have to stick to being 30 minutes or less if your track is already listed on Spotify or Pandora or any other streaming site that is considered release. We get so many broken links and we get excited to listen to all the submissions and we can't access them. That's always such a bummer. Stop that. We don't listen to you. Just sometimes you have we have to disqualify you. We get yelled at all the time on social media that we don't listen to you and we do. But unfortunately if we have to disqualify you. I can't listen to the entire song because I have hundreds of other submissions that do qualify. Once we choose the winner, we announce it to the public and we invite that person out to play at the show, and we're all there excited to hear them play their first set at EDC Las Vegas or whatever festival they might be playing at. Funny enough, I actually won the Discovery Project as an artist in 2014. It was my first introduction to the Insomniac team. That's really awesome to come full circle and now be helping lead the charge on choosing who's next and who the next Discovery Project winners would be. After winning Discovery Project, I soon realized that the artist side wasn't really for me. So I joined Insomniac and since then I've been helping build the Insomniac Music Group Insomniac Record side of the business. Some past winners that have come through the Discovery. Project System or Doctor Fresh, Kezo, Say My Name, Drezo and many more. Discovery Project was the launching pad for them within Insomniac and just overall their careers in the dance music space. Since winning the contest almost a decade ago, Doctor Fresh and Kezo have become some of the biggest success stories out of Discovery Project. The most exciting thing about Discovery Project is being able to work with previous winners or the alumni as we call them, and we don't want to say goodbye once they've won the contest. We want to continue to work with them and build a plan for them to grow within the Insomniac system. We want to make sure that our team here is in communication with them to figure out what the next steps are for them to grow. As an artist, Discovery Project was meant to be a launching pad for those artists in the future and we want to service them the best we can here at Insomniac. That's my favorite part of job is seeing an artist grow. Some names that we've signed early on their careers are John Summit, Noise Zoo, LPG, OB, Honey, Love. There's dozens of them that you know, we've started working with them very early on in their careers and then to see them now playing in front of 50,000 people, 70. 1000 people, it's really an it's an awesome feeling to be a part of that and working with those artists behind the scenes to, you know, to grow them. I think that up and coming DJ's should really focus on building a community around themselves, having people in your corner that root for you, that give you honest feedback that also, you know, care about you. There's a lot of opportunity in this scene to meet people who are like minded and maybe they're a better producer than you. Maybe you're a better producer than them and you have. The opportunity to learn from each other. I think staying humble throughout the process is really important. Never giving up. You know, there's a lot of times where we see the same people submitting over and over, and maybe this one isn't your time, but maybe the next one is. If you stick with it and you believe in yourself and surround yourself with people that believe in you, that you'll be successful no matter what. Discovery Project is growing more and more every year. I can't say too much and I don't want to be that guy, but big things coming. And then?