TUNES OVER MIAMI

[Kooperman]

TUNES OVER MIAMI

By MARY HUHN

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Hey Mr. androgynous, feather-boa-wearing, tongue-wagging deejay: Boy George will spin at next week's Miami Winter Music Conference.

February 29, 2004 -- Mayhem hits Miami Beach this week, when tens of thousands of dance music fans and professionals - packing bikinis and suntan lotion along with their vinyl albums - splash down for the 19th annual Winter Music Conference (Friday through March. 10 at the Wyndham Resort) and the hundreds of activities surrounding it.

More than 3,000 deejays and musicians perform at some 250 events - some tied to the official event, but most of them not.

And this year, there's a major bonus: New York deejay and writer David Prince is heading up a rival fest-within-a-fest, called the M3 Summit.

Like Slamdance is to Sundance, the M3 (Miami Music & Multimedia) Summit, running Friday through next Tuesday, is positioning itself to be the conference for insiders - the leaders of the industry.

"The [WMC] was turning into spring break for deejays," Prince says. "No business was getting done."

Prince is no newcomer to the scene. Six years ago, at Spin magazine, he organized a list of all the official and unofficial parties.

His e-mail list grew from 30 people - mostly friends - to more than 8,000. Deluged with email, he launched a Web site (m3masterlist.com) in 2001 with Flavorpill.

Lots of the music at the official WMC, he contends, is aimed at tourists - big-name acts to help stuff the clubs.

The conference, which began in 1986, is headlined by the world's most successful deejays, such as the Chemical Brothers (appearing at the festival for the first time ever), Sasha & John Digweed and Paul Oakenfeld - as well as New York dance rockers the Rapture and celebrity deejays, including Boy George, Perry Farrell and Tommy Lee.

In contrast, Prince's M3 is focusing on new, less-established artists, including Dizzee Rascal, Louie Vega and Telefon Telaviv.

"To keep the industry going, you have to showcase new talent," he says.

As for the panels, he wanted to get people talking about their concerns - the current highs and lows, the opportunities, the long-term issues.

"The M3 thing is really a culmination of a few years of frustration that the dance industry at large has had with WMC proper," says Scott Sterling, editor in chief of the dance music magazine URB.

"A large contingent of the dance music scene has felt ignored and neglected by [the conference]." World-famous deejay Oakenfeld says he's built his long-term biz relationships mostly through the unofficial events.

"The general feeling," says Sterling, "is that people think [M3] could be the next stepping stone for the industry."

http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/19256.htm