History and Background
It was founded in 1985 by then DJs and Record Pool Directors Louis Possenti and Bill Kelly. Held annually in Miami Beach, Florida, the Winter Music Conference, or "WMC" as followers of Electronic Dance Music call it, hosts around 100,000 people. The first Winter Music Conference took place at the Fort Lauderdale Marriott February 19-21, 1986 with approximately 80 dance music industry insiders in attendance. The event festivities are presented across Miami Beach and Downtown Miami. A major event is the International Dance Music Awards. The event commands a major international draw with around 38% of attendees coming from outside the United States. The conference serves as a platform for many underground and indie artists from over 70 different countries who spend the conference at events and panels; it is also a medium used by several entrepreneurs and consumer electronic companies to present their businesses and technological developments.
The WMC & The Recording Academy began in 1996 - a partnership presenting The Producers Forum, a gathering of legendary artists. Waxpoetics Magazine, JBL, and Stanton sponsored the first International Record Collectors Show in 2007. In 2009, the WMC introduced the first annual WMC VJ Challenge at The Miami Beach Resort & Spa with celebrity hosts, judges, and VJs from various parts of the world hosted by VJ Psyberpxie and Felix Sama. This inaugural year of the competition resulted in Sergey Lobodln (Moscow, Russia), walking away with the top winner prize. In 2010, the VJ Challenge was expanded into two areas of competition; Video Mixing and Audio/Visual Mixing. The 2010 VJ Challenge winners were AeonChild (Boulder, Colorado) in the video category and Eclectic Method (London/NYC) in the Audio/Visual category. The Miami Beach Resort also received the performance of the RoboMusic Demo in which Funkstar De Luxe and RoboProfessor (Henrik Hautop Lund) create live interactive compositions of RoboMusic.
Since 2008, the conference has received increasing competition from the International Music Summit taking place in Ibiza in May.
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