Magfest Staff Blog and Future Plans
This is the new (as of Jan 2009) Magfest staff blog where we'll be posting up news and info, and bouncing ideas off of you guys. I'm Dom, the new Music Coordinator of Magfest. Expect the same insane music from years past but more of it and even more badass.

I think I'm speaking for everyone in saying that Magfest 7 ROCKED and was the best one so far. We had 3 nights of concerts, jamspace, a chiptunes rave, tons of impromptu and scheduled bands, insane gaming, insane LAN, and all around good time. Plus we had excellent game industry presence, awesome panels. We had 1350+ attendees, almost 30% up from last year. This year we had the most game music bands ever.

I am starting up this Magfest staff blog to give everyone on Magfest staff the opportunity to communicate what our plans and ideas for next year are, and to let you guys give us feedback and suggestions. Keep in mind, any of the stuff you see on this blog can change in an instant - Magfest is incredibly flexible and we'll change stuff up until the day before if we feel like it'll work better.

Here's a laundry list of our biggest things that we're looking at for next year:

JAMSPACE: The biggest changes relate to scheduled events in Jamspace: Next year Jamspace will return to be ONLY 24/7 unscheduled jamming. There will be no concerts of any kind in there, just freeform jamming as it was meant to be. Having scheduled events in there was a hack to get around not having the support to put them in other rooms and limiting the amount of jam times. Next year we're going to have more space for the other events.

NEW CHIPTUNES DANCE PARTY: If you weren't in Jamspace on Friday or Saturday night, you missed almost a dozen fantastic chiptunes artists (including the unbelievable Renard + Virt headline) rock the hell out of a packed-to-capacity, insane, glowstick-wielding, breakdancing crowd. It turns out that Magfest DOES like chip+dance stuff after all. Next year, we're not only bringing this back, but we're moving it into the main concert hall and doing a full-on non-stop hardcore chiptunes+dj party - for real. Think same energy as this year but bigger and more badass. I need you all to pimp this out that next year's CHIPTUNES PARTY is NOT to be missed.

OPEN MIC CONCERT: One the cool side-effects of Jamspace was that it gets people together and, once in a while, spawns bands like Metroid Metal. The Open Mic concert is a chance for those going the extra step to prepare stuff to be able to show it off at Magfest. To this effect the Open mic concerts will probably be moving somewhere that's not jamspace and getting a bit more official-ized, maybe even moving to the main concert hall during the day. They will still be open for any group that wants to sign up. We're going to work on some details that also don't step on bands which need practice time.

STAFFING: Our staff is brilliant and hardworking, but we need more! If you're even remotely interested in helping out, this is the year we're going to need you the most because Magfest is going to explode. Magfest 8 is the year we've been waiting for. We're looking for talented people to step up and take charge of areas they are passionate about.

MEDIA OPS: We started up a new department at Magfest headed by Kroze and Xerol called Media Ops. Media Ops is currently gathering up over 100 hours of DV video, multitrack audio, pictures, sites, blogs, and anything for use in future promotion. This is also and archive for guys like PBC, X-Strike, ScrewAttack, and anyone else who wants stuff. The idea is that you send us a terabyte drive, or send e.g. $150 and we'll buy one for you. We'll load it up full of uncompressed DV video clips of interesting things with good audio, then ship the hard drive back to you for consumption.

On that note as well, I've started up a Wiki page for any news sites or threads or videos we find from here on out. Thanks to ANYONE who posted something about Magfest:
http://baltimorebarcams.com/dom/index.php?title=Magfest7Coverage

PROMOTION: I will also say that our future promotion plans are bigger in scope than anything we've ever done before. I will need everyone's help on this getting things posted to sites. Expect really really big things for next year's marketing Blitz, which will probably kick in around August to September.

Magfest is the anti-convention and we intend to keep it that way - nothing to us is more important than keeping that grassroots user-driven feel that makes Magfest so unique amongst all other gaming and music events. HELP US ON OUR ROAD TOWARDS INEVITABLE WORLD DOMINATION.

-Dom