site.btaThird SoAlive Music Conference & Festival to Be Held from October 14 to 17

The third SoAlive Music Conference & Festival will be held from October 14 to 17 in Sofia, the organizers announced on Tuesday. The event will once again bring together leading professionals, artists and key figures from around the world to continue its mission of bridging together talents from the Balkans and the global music scene, the organizers said.

This year, Glenn Micallef, European Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport, will participate in the event. Rob Garza, from the American electronic music duo Thievery Corporation, will deliver a special lecture.

For the first time, the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN) will hold its annual flagship conference, WINCON, here, turning Sofia into the center of the global independent music scene, bringing together leading labels and networks from around the world. The milestone event will be hosted in collaboration with the Bulgarian Association of Independent Music Publishers and Producers (ANMIP) as part of the SoAlive Music Conference.

The SoAlive programme combines a conference, a festival and business meetings, with the participation of a number of important figures in the music business. Among them representatives of YouTube, Bandcamp, TikTok, and labels, including Universal Music Group, Beggars Group (Adele, The Prodigy, Radiohead, Queens of the Stone Age, The Strokes), Partisan Records (Cigarettes After Sex, Fontaines D.C.), Domino Records (Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand), SubPop (Nirvana). Music journalists, supervisors and agents are expected to attend, including Emmy winner Thomas Golubic, Depeche Mode tour manager Daryl Bamonte, Rolling Stone critic David Fricke, senior editor of Pitchfork Anna Gaca, as well as experts who worked on festivals such as Primavera Sound, Exit, Colours of Ostrava, Electric Castle, Roskilde Festival, Mad Cool and EFG London Jazz Festival.