Vegas Music Summit aims to help artists break into the music business

Brian Saliba, an L.A. native, knows all about the music business and traffic jams.

The veteran Vegas show promoter — who has long been one of the local music scene’s busiest figures, from being the force behind the annual, all-ages music and sports fest Extreme Thing to booking gigs all across the city — used to manage bands in town.

For Saliba, getting his groups heard by the kind of music business deal makers who can make things happen was akin to being immobilized by the glare of so many flashing brake lights.

“I had a very hard time breaking into the industry, trying to figure out who to talk to to showcase the bands I was working with. And it was expensive to keep traveling back and forth to L.A.,” Saliba recalls. “I just figured it was easier to get with a group of my friends and say, ‘Let’s start something here and see where it goes.’ Now, we bring the industry to Las Vegas.”

Saliba does so via the Vegas Music Summit, a two-day gathering that will take place at the Downtown Grand and Backstage Bar & Billiards on Thursday and Friday (passes are available at www.vegasmusicsummit.com). The event will pair daytime panels where producers, entertainment lawyers, label owners and the like share their knowledge and experience on making headway in the music business with showcase gigs for unsigned acts attended by said industry folk at night.

Launched in 2008, the VMS has had success serving as a platform for bands who later went on to bigger things.

“The fact that we’ve helped launch a couple of artists that are pretty mainstream these days — AWOL Nation, Imagine Dragons, Saint Motel, Parade of Lights, to name a few — all of those bands have gotten something out of participating in this conference, so I think from an artist’s standpoint, we’ve legitimized ourselves as a real conference that can actually benefit the artists,” Saliba says.

That list includes Vegas hard rockers Otherwise, who are currently in the studio recording their fourth album with producer Bob Marlette (Shinedown, Seether, Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper). The band met entertainment lawyer Eric German after a demo-listening session at VMS.

“Eric was the first piece of the puzzle as far as building a professional team around the project,” Otherwise frontman Adrian Patrick says. “He started opening doors for us, introducing us to people, making connections for us, talking us up within the industry. Eventually, he’s the one who secured us a deal with (label) Century Media.”

This year’s lineup of panelists will include Sumerian Records founder Ash Avildsen, video and film director Nigel Dick (Guns N’ Roses, Oasis, Paul McCartney), Vegas-based producer Kane Churko (Five Finger Death Punch, Ozzy Osbourne, Papa Roach), producer/songwriter Amadeus (J. Lo, Justin Bieber, Trey Songz) and many others discussing such topics as the streaming business, artist branding and content and various legal aspects of the industry as well as hosting songwriting and production workshops.

Despite showcasing such Vegas acts as Almost Normal, Avalon Landing, We Gave It Hell and others this year, Saliba points out that the VMS isn’t intended for musicians alone.

“We don’t just focus on the artist,” he says. “There’s a whole business community and a student community that’s aspiring to break into the industry in some form, and for those nonmusicians, there’s the producers, the licensing, legal and management side.”

Mostly, though, his aim is to establish a commuter lane for bypassing career gridlock.

“You have a lot of these artists who may be playing out in the bars and doing the hustle and bustle and they’re not really getting anywhere,” Saliba says, “but all of a sudden they met a guy like (producer) Kevin Churko who can really take a good songwriter and make a hit. If we can take all these good local bands and make them better, give them the tools and the knowledge to make it a career, why not?”

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.