GRAMMY and Hyundai Emerging Musician Competition: CENTERSTAGE

CENTERSTAGE announced during Grammy weekend it's competition for three emerging music artists to be discovered and then mentored by Grammy award winning musicians.  The competition has a very small window for submitting, with performances to be uploaded on the CENTERSTAGE  site by February 19, 2013.  The underlying web platform powering this competition is the GRAMMY Amplifier engine.  At a recent press conference, shortly before the Social Media Rock Stars Summit that officially kicked off the live web streaming of Grammy weekend, the Grammy Recording Academy and Hyundai announced the competition with Mike Shinoda, member of Linkin Park representing the mentors.  Incidentally, Linkin Park is the number one band on Facebook with almost 50 million fans. Representing The Recording Academy was Evan Greene, CMO, and representing Hyundai was Jon Budd, Senior Group Manager of New Media Hyundai. The three are shown in this picture with Mike in middle, Evan on left, and Jon on right.





As described in a press release: "CENTERSTAGE was developed based on the success of GRAMMY Amplifier which was launched in January 2013.  It allows musicians to share their tracks via SoundCloud for a chance to have their music share on-line by a panel of musical icons." There will be three winners selected from among all music genres which will be announced at the upcoming March SXSW in Austin Texas at the GRAMMY party.  According to the press conference trio, there is really no set criteria for selection, but getting exposure to the Amplifier community should be useful for those competing.  A blue ribbon committee is being formed to select the three winners.  The event promoting the three winners will be tailored to reflect the talents of each. The press release did indicate, however, that one of the criteria will be social media driven based upon the "likes" showing up within the GRAMMY Amplifier community.  With such a short competition window, this is a great opportunity for three musicians to be discovered and then be mentored and publicized.

In announcing the competition, Mike Shinoda, talked about how he was discovered, based upon tapes that he and a friend had done imitating Snoop Dog, and sending them to an A&R music representative.  The music rep was stunned to learn that the two weren't a real band and encouraged them to see what they could do with other musicians. The rest is history.

ExperienceLA takes pride in being invited to this press conference to help publicize this competition, as we provide a platform for musicians to help publicize themselves with their appearances anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area.  Our event feed, merged with Ticketmaster, ends up on the official LA Tourism website. The ExperienceLA blog has helped to spotlight a number of emerging bands in our area appearing at clubs such as The Mint, and was especially proud of shining a light on a band that has now been invited to Coachella.  So if you are performing anywhere in Los Angeles, become an ExperienceLA cultural partner and help to publicize such appearances.  And again, take this opportunity being underwritten by the GRAMMY Recording Academy and Hyundai to compete in the CENTERSTAGE competition.

And here are a few more pictures as a slide show connecting to Flickr that I took at the press conference, or if you have an Ipad, then click here.






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