Rogue State

On this breezy January afternoon, the Doubletree Surfcomber Hotel hardly looks like the future home of the inaugural Miami Music Multimedia Summit. The hotel entrance leads to a long outside corridor that is infamous around South Beach for being confusing and difficult to navigate; it leads to a pool area overrun by patio chairs, small children running around in bathing suits, and vacationers lounging by the edge of the water. Farther down lies a vacant lot that leads to the beach. But it is at two tables positioned near the upper corner of the area where several members of the M3 Summit team sit; this is the first in a series of business meetings that will last through the weekend, geared to solidify the event's sundry details.

No one is dressed in a suit and tie, opting instead for shorts and T-shirts (hey, it's Miami). In fact one woman's arm is covered in tattoos that are as striking as the grungy T-shirt she's wearing. But all of them represent high-powered interests. The woman in question is Vickie Starr, co-founder of Girlie Action, a publicity and marketing firm that works with artists such as the White Stripes and the Strokes. There's a representative from Motorola, one of the event's co-sponsors, and Jonathan Rudnick, promoter and founder of one of New York's most treasured dance parties, Giant Step. At the center of them all is David J. Prince, notorious music journalist for magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone and a fifteen-year veteran of the U.S. dance scene.

In all this group radiates a blend of cool savoir-faire and business savvy that has caught the international music industry's attention. Some of its members are even opining that their forthcoming summit, which is scheduled to take place March 5 through 9, will offer strong competition against the more established Winter Music Conference (taking place from March 6-10) during a countywide party week that last year drew tens of thousands of revelers from around the world and generated about $15 million in revenue, according to the group. "Nobody knows for sure," says Prince.

For the past thirteen years, that week has been synonymous with WMC, even as the number of events unaffiliated with the conference has multiplied. Thanks to this group's disparate talents, however, the M3 Summit is the first real threat to the conference's control over the circuslike bazaar that occurs here every March. But today at least, WMC is like the elephant in the room: No one wants to talk about it.

"WMC is the reason everybody comes down here," says Prince, who says he's been going to conference week for the past eight years. "It's changed my life." He redirects attention toward his upcoming summit, which originated five years ago when he first assembled a list of WMC showcases for his friends and distributed it to several industry insiders through his Spin e-mail account. The list quickly grew in popularity as it trickled down from the hundreds of DJs, label owners, and journalists who attend the conference to the thousands of party people who travel here to crash the free parties and talent-heavy club events, until it became the de facto guide to the week's happenings.

Last year Prince's efforts attracted financial backers eager to exploit the list's subscription base, such as Heineken, which co-sponsored the Website for the newly christened Miami Master List (www.miamimasterlist.com). Sascha Lewis, a creator of cool urban e-mail newsletters such as www.earplug.cc and www.flavorpill.net, partnered with him to design a user-friendly site. But other industry friends encouraged him to have bigger plans.

"Everybody who comes for conference week looks to the list to be a guide for what we want to do during the week," says Starr. "We had really been bugging David about that, like, 'You've really got to build on that. There's so much more that can be done here."

After WMC concluded last year, Prince formed a coalition with several people who were transforming WMC week from a staid record industry conference into a sprawling, hedonistic music festival. In addition to the aforementioned Girlie Action, Giant Step, and Lewis's Flavorpill Productions, there was Carolyn Clerkson, who organized the Maxim/Fila Beach Basketball Court tournament last year; and others with experience handling large advertising and marketing accounts for mainstream companies like Motorola and Absolut vodka. "I can't take full credit" for M3, says Prince. "The reason all of those people are a part of the team is because at some point they had put the idea in my head."