Film Fest Gent launches cooperation with Spotify

In 2001 Film Fest Gent founded the World Soundtrack Awards, the most prestigious film music awards in the world. Each year the best contemporary soundtrack composers are recognised for their work. Due to this focus on film music, the festival soon became an annual meeting place for both internationally renowned and up and coming musical talents. The Spotify Public Choice Award will be one of the prizes given to the most popular soundtrack of a movie released between 1 July 2013 and 30 June 2014.

Valerie Dobbelaere, coordinator of the World Soundtrack Awards and the music projects at Film Fest Gent: "Thanks to the Spotify Public Choice Award, the World Soundtrack Academy consisting of 370 international film music professionals aren’t the only ones to award the best soundtrack of the past year, but the movie music fans around the world can also vote for their favourite score. By partnering up with Spotify, we hope to at least double the public votes in order to further strengthen the platform for international film music and give some well deserved attention to the film music composers.”

Besides the World Soundtrack Awards the festival also presents a great deal of international films and documentaries dealing with music. These are all programmed in the new section Sound and Vision, named after the brilliant song by David Bowie. The film concert of the Belgian band Arsenal: Dance! Dance! Dance! is the first title of the music section to be announced and will be held on 22 October 2014 in Vooruit. The film concert will combine unreleased soundtrack materials with known songs from Arsenal.

"Music and film, documentary and feature film, new and traditional media are getting more intertwined. Spotify is therefore the ideal partner to endorse Sound and Vision, the new section of Film Fest Gent, where music films are addressed in all its diversity." says Patrick Duynslaegher, Artistic Director Film Fest Gent.

Spotify’s Marketing Executive for the Benelux, Nienke Dettmeijer believes that: "Music and film are inextricably linked together. Music can give a film the right kind of balance and reinforces emotions. We are looking forward to finding out who will win the the Spotify Public Choice Award for the first time during the internationally renowned festival, Film Fest Ghent."

Spotify is an award-winning digital music service that gives you on-demand access to over 20 million tracks. Our dream is to make all the world’s music available instantly to everyone, wherever and whenever you want it. Spotify makes it easier than ever to discover, manage and share music with your friends, while making sure that artists get a fair deal. Spotify is now available in 57 markets globally with more than 40 million active users, and over 10 million paying subscribers. Since its launch in Sweden in 2008, Spotify has driven more than US$1bn to rights holders. Spotify is now the second biggest source of digital music revenue for labels in Europe, and the biggest and most successful music streaming service of its kind globally. For more info go to www.spotify.be.

The shortlist for the Spotify Public Choice Award, selected by the World Soundtrack Academy and the playlist of the Sound and Vision section can be streamed on the Film Fest Gent Spotify account at: http://open.spotify.com/user/filmfestgent. or through the follow button on the rop right side of our website.

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* Number of tracks licensed globally. Catalogue size varies per market and can also change over time.