We’ve just ended the second cycle of our Future of Music in LA projects at the Center for Music Innovation at UCLA Alpert.  We helped run a half-day symposium with the City of LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the UC Digital Humanities Initiative.  DCA organized another 11 events across February that connected event spaces, composers, and innovative artists that further stretched and asked the questions of what is Music in LA and whose Music is being created.  You can see the whole spread of events at this link at the CMI website and this link at DCA. This series and the experience of engaging in nearly all the sessions expanded my own vision of live music in a streaming age.  First, the fact that more than half of the RSVPs did not show and did not cancel, within EVERY community, was an intriguing item.  Why is that socially OK for a free event?  Are we in a digital collecting of experiences mode, afraid to miss out in having the option? I’m focusing for now on physical entertainment experiences and local communities, in conjunction with streaming, and just wrapped up our Future of Music in LA thread of events with the City of LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and local partners….and continuing that work across the year.  It has opened up a lot of avenues for us in terms of looking at tech, music, and social change.  The patterns of creation in different parts of the community and how they are becoming in current regulatory, policy, and digital environments is a very interesting question, as well as what can be done on the more formal and informal fronts to nurture live music is an expanding conversation here.  It is probably launching two new classes here on engaging and creating live performance communities, within or despite our tech-connected world. And I’m still working on different types of tech literacies in a world where the commercial ventures are trying to be “frictionless,” transparent, and increasingly abstract.  Lots of AI/ML events and “listening” to how everyone is talking about a desired digital future.