There are relatively few benefits of living on the West Coast from a Kindiefest perspective. It's a long plane flight, which means reduced flexibility in choosing how you get to Brooklyn, how long you stay, and what you do when you get there.
One advantage, however, is that you get a 5-hour flight. That's not so great when you're going there anticipating the conference (or when you have to do it on a red-eye as I did this year). But when you're flying back, it's a lot of time to sit and think about all that you heard during the weekend.
It is hard to overestimate just how much listening one does at Kindiefest. There are the panels, of course - those are more typically geared toward musicians, but if you are more broadly interested in how one carves out a career as kids musician, a non-professional musician can find nuggets of things to ponder.
Besides the panels, there is all the music. The showcase performances on Saturday night, the public festival on Sunday -- it's more than 7 hours of music in total, from all sorts of genres and all around the country.
And depending on your personality or need, you can spend more time than either of those just listening to others in one-on-one (or more) talks. Conversations are two-way, of course, but as a member of the media who isn’t looking to do interviews but meets a lot of artists who want to say ”hi” or tell me about their album plans or just introduce themselves, I do a lot of listening then, too. It's enough to make you want to see a museum or go out for a run on Sunday morning, neither of which I got to do this year.
What did I do at this year’s Kindiefest? Well, I got into Littlefield, the conference's home for the past 3 years, about 12:15 PM Saturday after the aforementioned red-eye, so I missed the keynote on Friday night and the post-talk schmoozing. Which meant there was even more schmoozing to do in the limited amount of time I was there. I did a lot of it -- seeing old friends, like Jeff and Dave and meeting folks I had previously known only through the magic of the Internet (hi, Jeff Giles!). I also talked with a lot of musicians and booking artists and PR folks. I don't think I talked with every single one of the 350 or so record-setting number of attendees, but there were times when I felt that I did. The only way I know I didn't is that there were folks that I wanted to talk to whom I realized on the flight home I didn't.
Like elephants? Portmanteaus? The alphabet? Whimsical sculptures that are elephants and portmanteaus and alphabets in and of themselves? Then I would suggest the video below.
