The 2026 program brings industry leaders, technologists and artists together across two cities. Shanghai moves over three days from industry foundations, through artificial intelligence, to human creativity. Tokyo condenses the same questions into a single conference day on discovery, rights and regional reach. Keynotes, roundtables, product showcases and live performance structure each day.
Three days built around a single arc: the foundations the industry actually runs on, what artificial intelligence is doing to them, and why people keep making music anyway.
How the global music business is reorganizing itself, and what holds its value once content stops being scarce.
Opening through to the midday break
The official opening of the three-day Shanghai program: welcome addresses from civic and regional representatives, a keynote address from the China Audio-Video Copyright Association (CAVCA), and IMX’s opening keynote, “FUSION: From Global Connectivity to Industry Integration.”
The launch ceremony of the music track showcase of the 2026 Shanghai Cultural & Creative Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, with city and district leaders and industry partners.
Recognizing projects and teams delivering real results in preserving, digitizing, circulating and contemporarily reimagining traditional music.
World Music Seeds opens with sound rather than slides: an unmediated live performance and field recording, heard first on its own terms, in its own language and cultural setting.
As discovery, generation and learning grow more dependent on data, what happens to traditional music that was never digitized, annotated or explained — and how can technology help those sounds be preserved, understood, circulated and carried into new creative systems?
China’s new position in the global music industry: how platforms, technology, rights capability and the creator ecosystem are reconnecting, and how the Chinese music industry can build new collaborations and room for growth.
How AI is helping deliver a higher-quality music experience on HarmonyOS.
Growth in the global music market is increasingly coming from outside the traditional centers. This session looks at what it actually takes for independent music companies, tech builders and IP owners to expand across regions – from Brazil to Europe, from Russia/CIS to a global YouTube audience, and between China and Europe. Speakers will discuss localization, platform dependence, the role of associations and cross-border networks, and what makes cooperation between markets last beyond the first deal.
Open networking during the break
Independent electronic music no longer requires sharing a room. Jody Jirong performs work from the album Is it gonna happen again?, then talks through remote collaboration across time zones and the creative choices and trade-offs behind it: bedroom production, breaking free of genre labels, and turning private experience into music that listeners can share.
Resuming after the midday break
When a work is completed by people, models and data together, composition, recording, voice, training data, prompts, editing, performance and the model itself each contribute something. How does the industry recognize, license, track and pay for those contributions?
If producing music is no longer the constraint, what appreciates instead — catalog, artist identity, verifiable rights, cultural context, fan relationships, or the ability to find and curate? And how should companies redistribute assets, people and budget accordingly?
A brief update on the International Music Alliance: the new initiative around IMX Almaty, and the road to IMX 2027 Central Asia.
An overview of the Russian and CIS music markets, the technical capabilities and innovation of Russian music platforms, and how to build a two-way content distribution bridge between the CIS and Asia.
How platforms decide what gets in, what gets recommended and what earns. Should AI-generated and AI-assisted work be labelled? How are identity, provenance, licensing and revenue flows verified — and who carries the cost of fraud detection and governance?
As streaming growth slows in mature markets, where will the music industry’s incremental revenue and profit come from over the next three to five years? This session focuses on three of the most debated growth drivers – AI licensing, superfans and fan communities, and emerging markets – and asks the question that matters most: will the new value ultimately be captured by creators, music companies, platforms, or technology companies?
Times are local to each city. Session titles, topics, times and running order may change. Speakers are announced separately.
Speaker applications remain open across the 2026 circuit while the program is finalized.
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