Digital & Music Matters, a major event in Asia covering all digital entertainment verticals under one roof, was held for the third consecutive year in Singapore from 20-24 May. This year’s event comprised interactive workshops, panels and keynote presentations, two days of music academy sessions and five days of entertainment, and attracted some 1,400 delegates from about 400 companies across 30 countries. This was also the first year all the events were streamed “live” on YouTube for over 50 hours, reaching out to a global audience.

Labelling it as bigger and better than previous years, Mr Jasper Donat, President of Digital & Music Matters and Chief Executive Officer of Branded Ltd said “the overwhelming response received this year is a sign that the Asian market is growing”. This increasing focus on Asia has also been underscored by the recent entry of major global digital music services such as iTunes, Spotify, Deezer and KKBox in Singapore.

This year’s conference saw keynote presentations and speakers from Microsoft, Movideo, Akamai, Google, Samsung, SingTel, HBO Asia, YouTube, Omnifone, Brightcove and many more. Delivering the event’s opening keynote, Mr Taras Bugir, Worldwide Managing Director, Media and Cable, Microsoft discussed the huge opportunities that were opening up in premium online video space and what digital entertainment businesses could do to take advantage of these developments.

To do well in the digital economy, Mr Bugir highlighted three things that companies need to get right. These are: to aggregate the audience, find the right product and manage the customer.

Emphasising the need to aggregate the audience, he noted that in the digital world, as in most mediums, only a fraction of customers were regulars, and the rest were made up of “fly-bys”. “Fly-bys are opportunities,” he said. While businesses continued to serve the regulars, they also had to find ways to aggregate the fly-bys.

With regard to finding the right product, Mr Bugir pointed out that majority of content was generally the “long-tail content” while the rest was premium content that people were willing to pay for because it was exclusive, ground-breaking and immediate.

As for managing the customers, the challenge would be to reach out to customers who are loyal to the business, track them, get them to use the services or content, and get them to pay for it.  It is important for companies to monetise services in the areas of their strength and not offer for free because it will be challenging to re-introduce paid models.

Besides the issues surrounding monetisation, other sessions at Digital Matters included panel discussions on advertising innovations, which looked at how brands were leveraging the power of online video marketing; the business and technical methods deployed for TV everywhere; and the opportunities that online videos for new fan engagement in the sports industry.

Digital Matters was held together with Music Matters Live, YouTube Fan Fest with HP, and a full-day HP Music Academy mentoring workshop for budding artistes. The event was supported by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore under its Digital Marketplace Programme (DMP). DMP aims to establish Singapore as the hub of choice in Asia for the emerging digital economy, building a vibrant ecosystem of world class companies to offer innovative and competitive digital consumer services for the region.