A boutique showcase for musicians

The corridors of the music industry in Los Angeles are still full of weary legions whose ears haven’t stopped ringing from the recently concluded South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, and the Winter Music Conference in Miami, which featured a combined 3,000 acts, many of them in search of record deals. So it may seem an odd time to announce yet another conference with bands trying to catch an industry ear, yet that’s exactly what the organizers of MuseExpo plan to do today.

But the event’s co-founder, Sat Bisla, said that coming on the heels of those massive conferences will only highlight the chasm between his boutique-minded event and the more famous gatherings that can feel like an off-the-rack outing.

“It’s not about how many people are in the room, it’s who is in the room,” Bisla said of the event he’s planning. Good thing he doesn’t think bigger is better: South by Southwest had 10,000-plus registrants this year, while MuseExpo is expecting a ceiling of 750 or so for its conference, which runs April 30 through May 3.

The daylight hours of the conference at the Bel Age hotel in West Hollywood will have forums with scheduled participants to include Virgin Records Chairman Jason Flom, Napster Chief Executive Chris Gorog, Yahoo! Music General Manager David Goldberg and KCRW-FM (89.9) Music Director Nic Harcourt. At night, performances are planned at the Viper Room, the Roxy and the Key Club by more than two dozen bands looking for their big break in America.

Among them is Ella Rouge, a Stockholm band that was a top-five artist on MySpace in February and will be making its North American debut. The lead singer, Ludvig Andersson, is the son of ABBA co-founder Benny Andersson. Other performers include Bloodpit, a band from Finland, and Fortune Drive, fronted by a singer whom Bisla describes as a “modern-day Jimi Hendrix.”

For Bisla, who has a syndicated radio program called “Passport Approved” that airs locally on Indie 103.1 (KDLD/KDLE-FM), creating a conference was not on his planned career path. As a principle in the company A&R; Worldwide, he had organized a series of dinners in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and London that brought together savvy thinkers from far corners of the music industry. When one of the dinner guests, a key person at BBC Radio, told Bisla that he had jetted in just for the gathering and that it might have a formal potential, Bisla hatched the concept of MuseExpo.

“It’s not intended to be a fast-food sort of event; it’s about integrity and the spirit and the outcome, which is people meeting and bands getting seen and maybe signed,” he said.

-- Geoff Boucher