Guest
Turo Pekari
Turo Pekari is Innovation and Business Development Executive at Music Finland, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Turo Pekari of Music Finland explains why music runs on personal relationships, how he built his own network, and why Music Tech Europe is launching.
Questions these episodes answer
Why does networking matter so much in the music industry specifically?
Pekari believes music is a more human-centric business than most other industries, where a large share of deals happen because of an existing personal relationship rather than a cold pitch. He thinks this comes from how passionate people in music tend to be about what they do, which naturally draws them closer to each other.
How did Turo Pekari build a reputation as a well-connected person in music?
Pekari says he deliberately built a personal expert brand around music and technology, separate from whichever company he worked for at the time, since standing out as an individual expert got him invited to host panels and speak at conferences. Those invitations then became the actual mechanism through which his network kept growing.
Why do Finnish professionals struggle to network at industry conferences?
Pekari says Finns are known for being quiet, so at a typical panel in Finland nobody speaks up during the question and answer segment and no one approaches the speakers afterward. He argues that is exactly the wrong approach, since informal conversation outside the official program is usually where real connections and opportunities form.
What is Music Tech Europe and who is behind it?
Music Tech Europe is a new collaboration between nine organizations from nine different European countries, including Nordic Music Tech, Music Tech Norway, MusicTech Germany, Music Tech France and others, meant to launch this fall. Its goal is building bridges between the traditional music industry and music startups around funding, knowledge and experimentation.
What was the first tool for tracking music usage inside Roblox?
Pekari says Finland's national broadcaster presented, to his knowledge, the first use case for a tool that tracks music usage inside Roblox, built with the Finnish collection society Teosto and the Dutch technology company Copyright Delta. He believes the approach could scale across tens of millions of Roblox worlds.