A conference built on hard questions
From viral moments to visa rejections, the 32nd Worldwide Music Expo in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria puts some of the industry’s most pressing questions at the centre of its conference programme
Each year in October, WOMEX lands in a different location with a familiar format: showcases of new music from around the world, a trade fair and a conference programme. At WOMEX 26, it’s perhaps the conference programme that gives the clearest sense of what the wider industry is currently grappling with. Shaped annually by an open call for proposals and an independent international jury, WOMEX 26 arrives with a programme that doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions: what kind of international music industry are we trying to build, and who gets to decide?
Across the many sessions on offer, the same tensions surface: an industry organised around short-term visibility set against one built for longevity, and a Global North centre of power set against a broader range of voices that have historically been excluded.
Artist development: Past the viral moment
Among this year’s sessions is Moving Past the Viral Moment, which starts from a straightforward premise: visibility alone does not guarantee a career, and an industry running on algorithms and short-form content is generating attention that most artists cannot convert into sustainable growth. Chaired by Aisha Iyanuoluwa Fancy (Ejoya/Elite Collectives, Nigeria), the panel brings together Kevin Asaju (More Clues & WUTA Entertainment, Nigeria) and Ree Sewell (SoundCloud, UK), covering A&R, distribution and marketing. The session treats longevity as something built through artist identity, community development, strategic partnerships and monetisation, not as the by-product of a trending moment. It draws heavily on lessons from the growth of African music and artist development beyond the established markets, while pitching its frameworks as applicable industry-wide – an argument echoed in mentoring sessions including Global South, Global Stage and Building Sustainable Careers as Music Managers. That marks a shift away from the career development models the industry has typically imported from the West.
Touring: Building to last
The touring strand asks a blunter version of the longevity question: can international touring be fair? Fair Touring Futures: Rethinking Global Live Music names the obstacles directly – visa rejections, border restrictions, rising travel costs and funding cuts – all falling hardest on artists from the Global South and independent scenes. Touring is becoming almost impossible for exactly the artists the rest of the programme is built around.
The session’s panellists – among them Melissa Perales, Miriam Brenner and Tina Wroblewski, working as promoters and bookers in Germany, the Netherlands and Canada respectively – propose cooperative touring circuits, shared guarantees and pooled risk between curators, promoters, agents and managers. The alternative is everyone solving the same border and cost problems alone. Slow Growth, Deep Roots makes a related case from the artist-development side, against a booking culture built on one-off gigs.
AI: Consent and remuneration
Who Owns the Future of Music? treats AI not as a tool to be explained but as a live contest over rights, data and cultural power. Three Spanish professionals working across AI research, digital distribution and intellectual property – Sergio Oramas (SiriusXM), Saúl Cabrera Hernández (Fira B!/EmuBands) and Antonio Muñoz Vico (J&A Garrigues) – examine training-data consent, fair remuneration and what emerging AI regulation means for artists, labels and cultural institutions. The framing avoids hype. The question isn’t whether generative systems will keep learning from global repertoires, but who gets paid and who gets erased in the process. Set against that, the session also promises a counterweight: Muñoz Vico’s argument that whatever the technology does, human sensitivity and artistic skill remain music’s real centre of gravity.
Mental health: No longer marginalised
Let’s Talk About Mental Health is a plain title, and that’s arguably the point. This year, the subject has moved from a side conversation to a mentorship session in its own right. Financial instability, pressure to succeed and exhaustion have made mental illness a widely reported problem across the sector.
The session is built around the questions colleagues rarely put to each other – about sleep, about self-criticism – and treats burnout, anxiety, depression and addiction as things the industry needs to discuss openly rather than manage privately. Its presence alongside the rest of the programme isn’t incidental: burnout and the instability of touring life are all being treated as structural problems rather than personal ones.
Regional strands: Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pan-Indigenous Network
The three regional strands make similar arguments from different angles. On Asia, From Emerging to Essential: Southeast Asia as Market and Partner pointedly rejects the “emerging market” language the industry has used for decades to keep a region at arm’s length. The companion Asia networking session, Bridging Borders: Reimagining Asia’s Music Ecosystem, turns that reframing into specifics: how trust, politics and market differences shape collaboration across the region.
Africa’s strand carries perhaps the sharpest structural question. Two sessions – Rhythms, Rights & Renaissance: Africa’s Music Rise and one asking directly whether Africa’s emerging markets can close the monetisation gap – sit alongside a Networking Session that puts the same question at the level of individual livelihoods. With African agencies, labels, festivals and artists succeeding internationally, are the practitioners doing that work being paid enough to keep doing it? The gap isn’t about talent or audience; it’s about who captures the value once African music cucceeds abroad.
Running alongside both of these are session on Latin America, as well as the return of the Pan-Indigenous Network, first convened at WOMEX in Gran Canaria in 2018. Rather than a new session on a new topic, it’s framed as a reflection on what the network has made possible since then – the relationships formed, the lessons learned, and an emerging Declaration Plan grounded in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It’s a reminder that this year’s “who gets to decide” question isn’t new to WOMEX; for the Pan-Indigenous Network, it’s been under discussion for the better part of a decade.
Beyond the sessions
With more than 36 sessions programmed for WOMEX 26, these are among the highlights, and they circle the same uncomfortable questions. What emerges is a conference trying to do something more deliberate than showcase talent and broker deals. It’s asking its attendees to reconsider what “success”, “fairness” and “partnership” actually mean once the short-term wins are stripped away.
Whether WOMEX 26’s conversations translate into changed practice is, as ever, a question for the year after the conference rather than the week of it. That the questions are being asked at all says WOMEX knows what the industry is up against – and intends to be where the answers get worked out.
WOMEX 26 takes place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, from 21 to 25 October 2026. For the full programme and to book tickets, visit www.womex.com