Dave Kusek is a teacher, consultant, entrepreneur, digital music pioneer, author, speaker, mentor and Senior Partner at Digital Cowboys and New Artist Model. Dave was Vice President at Berklee College of Music in Boston for 14 years, where he created Berkleemusic.com, a hugely successful online enterprise for Berklee. Berkleemusic has since become the world’s largest music school reaching over 20,000 students in 170 countries.
Prior to that, Kusek helped develop the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), was co-inventor of the first electronic drums called “Synare”, and founded the first music software company in 1980, Passport Designs, which made it possible for musicians to record and produce their music at home with its award- winning software. His efforts, along with others, set the stage for the multi-billion dollar digital music market that exists today.
In 2005 he co-authored the best selling music business book “The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution” which predicted much of what has happened in digital music, including the iPhone, Apple’s SIRI, Spotify, streaming music and the decline of the recorded music industry.
Kusek was a faculty member at Berklee College of Music where he taught music business and a founding faculty member at Berklee Online where he taught The Future of Music and the Music Business.
Kusek has written for or been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Billboard, Wired, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, Associated Press, Boston Business Journal, MTV, CNBC, SF Chronicle, Forbes, NBC-TV, Nightly Business Report, NPR, Financial Times, and the Guardian. Kusek has been a speaker at Midem, Music Hack Day, Digital Music Forum, NAMM, AES, IEBA, MacWorld, Comdex, SXSW, ADISQ, Digital Hollywood and a featured guest on radio and television stations around the world.
Producer and musician George Howard founded his first independent label, Slow River Records, in 1993. In 1995, Slow River entered into a co-venture with Rykodisc, one of the world’s largest independent labels, and George became president in 1999. He is currently an Assistant Professor and Executive in Residence at Loyola University and a online Professor […]
Fred Goldring is a Los Angeles-based entertainment attorney, marketing strategist and political activist. His company is Goldring, Hertz, Lichtenstein & Haft. His clients include Beyonce, Alanis Morissette, Herbie Hancock, Courtney Love, No Doubt, Ne-Yo, Boyz II Men, Guns N” Roses, Black Eyed Peas, and Will Smith. He is a graduate of Duke University and The […]
David Kershenbaum is grammy award winning music producer with over 75 international gold and platinum albums to his credit. At the legendary A&M records, Kershenbaum signed and helped develop the careers of Janet Jackson, Bryan Adams and Joe Jackson and many others. Kershenbaum’s credits read like a “who’s who” of the artist world, including Supertramp, […]
Justin Shukat is a founding partner and General Manager at Primary Wave Music Publishing. Focusing on new marketing initiatives, Justin is currently developing a series of entertainment properties that leverage Primary Wave’s copyrights. Some of the company’s clients include Nirvana, Aerosmith, Hall & Oates, and The Airborne Toxic Event. Justin’s music career began at The […]
Here are two visions for the future, one from Corning and one from me. The Corning video is from earlier this year and shows their vision for a visually connected communications environment. This is not unlike the future that Gerd Leonhard and I described in the Future of Music in 2005. Can you imagine organizing […]
A new survey from the Gartner group shows digital music revenues forecast to grow less than 5% per year. This is close to flatlined if you factor in inflation. Not good news for most of the world. ■ Online music revenue from end users will grow more than 31% by the end of the forecast […]
My friends at the Future of Music Coalition are conducting an online survey from Sept 6 – Oct 28th to determine the variety, depth and complexity of the ways that musicians are making money these days. Not theoretically, but actually. We are looking for performers, songwriters, composers, band members, session players, producers, MCs and anyone […]
The future of the profitability of the recorded music business is unquestionably in jeopardy. One might speculate that new “access based” services like Rdio and Spotify could re-start a failing record industry. I hope so. But as sales have fallen to less that 1/2 their heights at the turn of the century, artists and their […]
My friend Roger McNamee, a founding Partner and Managing Director of Elevation Partners has been getting some great press lately on his thoughts on the new music business, investing in technology, Apple, Google, Facebook and much more. Here is the transcript of a speech he gave at NARM earlier this summer, a must read. “Our […]
We all need a good laugh for the weekend. From Gary Tan at Y Combinator. Happy 4th of July Everybody! Dave
Well, we finally have it. Music like water raining down from the sky. iCloud. For slightly more than $2/mo everybody will soon have access to all the music they can find, steal, share, rip, produce, morph or buy using iTunes Match. Is this amnesty for all the music pirates? I hope so. As we predicted […]
Kaiser Chiefs released their new album, The Future is Medieval, on Friday in a very creative manner that is completely customizable by their fans, and with a pretty unique twist, generates income for the fan. Visit the band’s website, and choose 10 out of 20 tracks and create your own personalized version of the album, […]
Here is an excerpt from a great piece from Wyndham Wallace of The Quietus on how the music industry is killing music and blaming the fans. This rather dark opinion is spot on in so many ways and raises some very difficult questions about the future of the music business that most people do not […]
Great content attracts attention. Our friends Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan are Karmin and have found amazing lightning-fast popularity with this cover of Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne, Busta Rhymes “Look At Me Now”. 2.9 million views on YouTube as of a few minutes ago, in less than 7 days. Wow. That’s some velocity. Nod […]
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From the Wharton School, an article on the new economics of life for creators and how they will be compensated in the future. Making a living as an artist has never been easy — whether in film, music or publishing. But the digital revolution — and to a lesser extent, the global economic crisis of […]
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Andrea Leonelli from Digital Music Trends recorded a series of interviews with many of us from the Midem show. You can listen to the interviews here or go to his site for lots more. Thanks Andrea! This Midem 2011 series includes: Daren Tsui, CEO of cloud service mSpot Dave Kusek, Vice President Berklee College of […]
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This is a fantastic visualization of data from Dr. Hans Rosling on the growth of wealth and lifespans over the past 200 years. A little off topic, but so interesting. I have seen Dr. Rosling do similar presentations at TED over the years.
The Pew research team reports that most online purchasers spend about $10 per month for digital subscriptions, paid content and access to paid media. However, the heaviest users spent much more per month. – 65 percent of internet users have paid for online content – 33 percent of internet users have paid for digital music […]
I will be speaking and schmoozing at both NAMM and MIDEM this month. If you are going to be there, please look me up or send me an email. NAMM – Friday 1/14/11 2:45pm Anaheim, CA Namm Hot Zone – The Future of Music MIDEM – Sunday 1/23/11 3:30pm Cannes, France Midem Net […]
According to the latest report from Nielsen and Billboard, digital music accounted for 46% of all U.S. music purchases in 2010, up from 40% in 2009 and 32% in 2008, and digital track sales hovered around 1 billion sales a year for the third straight year. The top-selling digital songs of 2010 sold about 4 […]
Last Friday I was interviewed by Dr. Amy Vanderbilt @DrAmyVanderbilt from the Trend POV Show where we discussed the changing distribution in the music industry and what it means for businesses everywhere. Here you go: http://www.trendpov.com//sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player-viral.swf Check out lots of great interviews on trends in business at Trend POV.
I did some interviews recently with Jacob Templin from Time Magazine about the realities of the music business today and what is working for some bands. Here is one of the videos. Unfortunately you have to endure a 15 second ad before viewing the story. With hit songs like Code Monkey, the software developer turned […]
For the past 5 years I have been delivering presentations, in a wide variety of contexts including Digital Music Forum, AES, Billboard, IEBA, Music Hack Day, NAMM, Digital Hollywood and at many, many other private consulting gigs. The essence of the presentation I have been making since 2006 is shown below with a couple of […]
From the Economist “The music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of writers and publishers, has added up the entire British music business. He reckons it turned over £3.9 billion ($6.1 billion) in 2009, 5% more than in 2008. It was the […]
There is a lot of innovation happening with electronic music instruments and new interfaces. Reactable is one of the latest in music technology fusing DJ culture, touch screen topography and electro-pop showmanship. Coming to an iPad near you. Reactable says their company “is about the promotion of creativity and the mediation of culture through the […]
I just started to read Ripped from Greg Kot and I can tell you already that I am going to make this required reading for my online course on the Future of Music. Greg really has done his homework. Ripped presents a definitive account of the digital music revolution, which changed the way music fans […]
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