Knight Foundation supports the MIA Music Summit to strengthen Miami’s emerging community of entrepreneurs, startups and makers. Demian Bellumio is a partner at MIA Collective, which is hosting the event.

On March 22, Miami’s music ecosystem will begin its new evolution.  On that day, more than 100 hackers are expected to gather at The LAB Miami to compete in Miami’s first “music hackathon,” the MIA Music HackDay.  But that is just the beginning …

The hackathon is part of an ambitious undertaking by MIA Collective. With the support of founding sponsor Knight Foundation, and other amazing local partners, such as .CO, Senzari, Choose Digital and SESAC Latina, we are launching a world-class music conference that unites Silicon Valley and Miami.

The MIA Music Summit will take place on March 24 at the New World Center in Miami Beach, and for its first edition we have secured a roster of globally recognized speakers from some of the world’s leading companies, such as Facebook, Harman International Industries, Viacom, Music Dealers and Fon.

The goal in this first MIA Music Summit is to produce a fun, thought-provoking, inspiring, and knowledge-packed event that will position Miami as a natural meeting point for digital music thought leaders from the U.S., Europe and Latin America.

As we all know, Miami is undergoing an incredible evolution, and entrepreneurs like me are aggressively pushing forward to develop our startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem with all sorts of initiatives, such as meet-ups, conferences and other events. 

We believe that this is critical to developing and retaining talent here in South Florida. We want to achieve critical mass so that we can begin seeing some breakout successes that turn our local entrepreneurs into leading global players. These success stories will give global credibility to our community, which will help convince the young talent being developed locally to stay here instead of leaving for other places.

But what advantage does Miami have to increase its chances of giving birth to these success stories?  At MIA Collective, we believe that within the music vertical, Miami has a unique opportunity to unite a fast-growing and dynamic startup sector with the more traditional music ecosystem composed of many record labels and artists that have made Miami their home for decades.  In addition, Miami is home to world-class universities doing great research into music innovation, and it has one of the world’s most advanced music laboratories in the New World Center, home of the New World Symphony.

Digital music is finally maturing to the point that it is becoming the main revenue generator for the industry, and not many places have the advantage of having those three worlds collide in one location.  We believe that Miami can take advantage of this and leapfrog other cities to become a future hub for digital music innovation.

We expect more than 300 attendees to be part of this first MIA Music Summit. This is your chance to network  with the world’s leading experts and potentially meet the future co-founder of your dream startup.

We hope to see you all at the MIA Music Summit.