1) Don't stay at the conference hotel. It's too damn far from every other place you want to be, and taxis are scarce!
2) Stay longer! I arrived Thursday evening and left Monday morning. Looks like I missed some great parties Monday night.
3) Make sure you go with someone. I actually didn't do a whole lot of late night partying, because I didn't feel completely comfortable going alone to some of the parties. I made a lot of friends, but they all seemed to want to go to different events. I was supposed to meet a few friends down there, but two of them couldn't make the trip, and one was a performer that had a very busy schedule.
4) Pack an empty suitcase. I lugged almost 80 lbs of carry-on with me all day on Monday, after checking two bags. You get a lot of STUFF at WMC.
5) Remix Hotel and M3 are really cool. Lots of equipment and software to learn about. I came away wanting to buy some DJ software for my PC, so I could learn how to DJ!
6) Visine should be a WMC Corporate sponsor. Every afternoon (you wouldn't see anyone around in the morning) you would see plenty of people that could have used a little sample of Visine.
7) Good Music is Good Music, no matter what. As a 42 year old, married, mother of two teenagers, dance music fanatic, I did feel a bit out of place at the Ultra Music Festival. However, I screamed louder than the 18 year old kids when D-Fuse announced they were going to try a new song they'd been working on for a couple of weeks, and the guitarist ripped into the the opening to Heart's "Barracuda". Then I started laughing when I realized that most of those kids hadn't even been born when the song came out!
8) Know what events you want to attend, try to get tickets or get on the guestlist, and have backup plans. You need to start looking over "The List" and M3's Masterlist online a few weeks beforehand. The number of parties going on during the week will boggle your mind!
9) If you listen closely and pay attention, you can tell the difference between house, progressive house, trance, breaks, drum'n'bass, and all those other terms that confused me before. Now I know that my favorites are Dance-Pop (especially with Diva Vocals), House, Progressive House, and Trance.
10) There are a lot of passionate, hard-core dance music fans out there. We network like crazy, we know how to party for days on end, AND WE SPEND A TON OF MONEY on the music we love!
