“There’s a quote I like,” Katie Longmyer, creative strategist and co-owner of the Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival, said. “‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.'”
It’s that mindset that has Longmyer, on the eve of her festival’s sixth year, at the forefront of the future of the music industry.
With the festival, her creative network Good Peoples (which throws the now-international Select Fridays parties), her production company/marketing agency MeanRed and, now, her collaboration with DJ and producer Nick Hook on new label Calm+Collect, the woman known to her co-conspirators as “Queen Bee” has found ways to pair talent with opportunities.
“I believe in the power of community,” she said. “The dance music community is a really good example; it started small and underground, and stayed consistent and strong and collaborative.”
Longmyer got her first education in music via the industry she now works around, serving time at Warner Bros. From there, she has found collaborators for promotions, parties, performance venues and almost anything else that brings people together through music and art.
“I like to say I’m a business artist,” she said. “I might have a musician around me, or a stylist, or a jeweler. … I see how they can collaborate. That’s the way I make art.”
Her version of “festival art,” the Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival, started as a one-day gathering at the (late and beloved) BKLYN Yard and has now grown into a three-day, seven-venue blowout.
Legends of dance music like John Digweed, tastemakers such as Pete Tong and local favorites like Hook will each perform.
“Every time you grow, you learn something new,” Longmyer said. “Add a day, and there’s more people and a wider audience. ? We grow all year long, so we get to take the lessons that we learn every day and apply them to the festival. It’s a constant living, breathing experiment.”
