Midem

Midem, the historic international market of the music industry, has been relaunched in Cannes since 2025 in a new format after a break, bringing music and live entertainment professionals together in the Riviera winter.

For decades, since it was created in 1967, Midem was held in Cannes as the great international event of the music industry, a fair attended by the biggest names in world record production when the physical record market still dominated the music economy, before gradually declining with the digital transformation of the sector, until it stopped completely.

The event was relaunched by the City of Cannes with a new operator from 2025, in a more compact format but reaffirming its historic ambition to bring the international music industry together, with particular attention this time to the sector's new challenges: streaming, artificial intelligence applied to music creation and changing business models in live entertainment.

Every winter, in January or February, the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès welcomes labels, publishers, streaming platforms and live entertainment professionals from all over the world for a few days of business meetings, conferences and artist showcases, in a winter period traditionally quieter for Cannes and the whole Riviera.

Midem's current format, more low-key than in its heyday around the turn of the 2000s, when the event brought together several tens of thousands of professionals, nevertheless remains a strategic stop for international business clients keen on networking and keeping up with the sector, with transport needs similar to those of other B2B fairs in Cannes: punctuality, discretion and reliable airport transfers rather than the more visible glamour of other Cannes events.

This winter low season has a notable advantage for business travellers: Cannes, free of summer tourist crowds, offers much smoother traffic and generally more flexible hotel and transport availability than in high season, a context that makes for a more flexible stay.

Midem's history reflects in many ways the profound changes the music industry has gone through over the last fifty years: born at the height of vinyl and physical distribution, the event lived through the arrival of the CD, then the digital revolution and streaming, with each major technological change in the sector echoed in the themes of successive editions, up to its recent overhaul, which now fully integrates the challenges of generative artificial intelligence applied to music creation.

The 2025 relaunch came with a clear intention to reposition Cannes as a meeting point between the traditional music industry and new players in digital entertainment, with a programme that now combines classic meetings between labels and publishers, sessions on streaming platforms and discussions on new models for paying artists in the digital age.

The organisers of the new format chose a more compact but deliberately more qualitative approach, focusing on the density of business meetings rather than the sheer number of participants that characterised Midem's historic editions around the turn of the 2000s, a strategy aimed at making the fair relevant again in a music industry radically transformed by twenty years of digital upheaval.

The choice of Cannes for this relaunch is no accident: the city has one of the most renowned congress facilities in Europe thanks to the Palais des Festivals, originally designed and regularly modernised to host events on the scale of the Cannes Film Festival, which lets Midem benefit from top-level facilities despite its more modest current format.

This geographical continuity with the major Cannes events of spring and summer is also an advantage for local transport and hotel professionals, who can build on well-established expertise in welcoming demanding international business clients, even if the volume and intensity of demand are naturally lower than in the height of summer.

The compact format, over three or four days, shorter than other major Cannes fairs, encourages business clients to make the most of every minute of their stay, with many meetings during the day and networking dinners in the evening, a pace that makes a chauffeur particularly valuable to waste no time travelling between the Palais des Festivals and the informal meeting places spread across the city.

LimoAirportGroup supports these business clients with transfers from Nice airport and full-day chauffeur hire, at a time of year when availability generally remains more flexible than in high season, while maintaining the same standard of punctuality expected by international business clients used to the standards of the major B2B fairs.

Discreet and reliable transport is particularly important for these music industry clients, as many meetings involve artists or executives who want to keep their movements confidential, a know-how LimoAirportGroup has developed through its experience of all the major business and cultural events on the Riviera.