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.
Sony has announced a new series of flash-based digital music players designed to give the iPod Shuffle a run for the money. The new Walkman Beans sport a built-in FM tuner and are available in 512 MB and 1 GB versions. The units play both MP3 and ATRAC3 music files, in addition to supporting WMA […]
Imagine being able to broadcast and receive digital information from your Wi-Fi enabled car, cell phone, handheld computer or MP3 player as you move around your environment. Everyone participates in a dynamic, decentralized network of individuals sharing information with anyone within a 30 mile radius. Sound far fetched? Not so. "Roadcasting is collaborative, mobile radio. […]
In the past, Sony with it’s Walkman brand, dominated the personal electronics market for music. Today it is Apple and it’s iPod that dominates the market. Many Wall Street analysis publicly stated that they didn’t feel Apple could sustain its growth in the iPod market, but last weeks quarterly results demonstrated that Apple’s high-water mark […]
From William Gibson, in Wired "Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social […]
A study published today by UK research firm The Leading Question claims that people who share music files online also buy four and a half times more music online than your average music listener. Instead of tragically costing the industry money, these people are apparently very interested in finding music online, and as a result, […]
The Digital Age and The Future of Music. It’s no secret that the music industry is challenged on multiple fronts. Now that we’re in the digital age, how can they change their outlook? Celia Hirschman, KCRW’s music industry commentator, speaks with Gerd Leonhard, co-author of The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution. […]
Winamp Creator Justin Frankel has built a collaborative online jamming environment for musicians. Frankel’s new project, Ninjam, allows musicians to jam and record over the internet. A high speed connection is required, but the latency of the internet still persists as a problem. But turning a strength into a weakness, Ninjam records each musician on […]
Sales down almost eight percent in first half of 2005 Gloom returned to the record business in the first half of 2005, as album sales dropped 7.6 percent compared with the same period last year, despite blockbusters from 50 Cent, Mariah Carey and Coldplay. In 2004, a two percent rise in sales from the previous […]
The US Senate has recently turned its attention to online music licensing. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property initiated the discussions Tuesday. At root is whether the current licensing framework for digital services is fair and clear enough to promote entry and growth. Rob Glaser of RealNetworks argued that there are inequalities which need […]
Check out this very cool web interface for a mobile music service. YES.
The new names in digital music are familiar, but they specialize in commercial music. Everyone knows Apple Computer as the company that is now moving more iPods than Macs. Former peer-to-peer bad boy Napster is now the lobotomized pimp of commercial music subscription services…. The broadband migration continues. Bandwidth and servers get perpetually cheaper, yet […]
From The Future of Music book There is no direct proof that file sharing itself is hurting the music industry. Record companies are touting this single-bullet theory to explain away all the ingrained problems of an antiquated business reaching the end of its life cycle. Indeed, one can argue that file sharing is the cheapest […]
For the industry, the best news about the Supreme Court ruling is that both music and technology companies can move forward with a clearer understanding of what the rules are. It is time to get to work. There is a fantastic opportunity for all parties to come to the table and establish some standards and […]
This excerpted from the March 29th transcript of the oral arguments in MGM vs. Grokster between Richard Taranto Esq, attorney representing Grokster, et. al. and Justice Anthony Scalia. MR. TARANTO: Let me say a few words about what the record says about legitimate activities. Altnet is a company — they say that they have distributed, […]
Held back by fear, you are. The music industry can’t preserve its current model of total control. Rather, it must embrace P2P and other new technologies because consumers won’t accept anything less than full freedom. In the future,preventing customers from doing things they have grown used to will equal a quickly executed death blow. For […]
Music fans once turned to radio DJs to expose them to new music. But as music grows on the net, listeners are relying on friends and strangers to feed them — often in creative combinations. Forget the album and corporate radio. Fan-built playlists and mixes are taking over the way people get their music. Read […]
"Before, say, ’94 or ’95, before the Internet came around, there seemed to be a sharper divide between those who create and those who consume: It seemed like you were supposed to be either one or the other. I love to see this kind of American rebellion, fueled by extreme hate for the record label, […]
All eyes are on the Supreme Court, with a decision in this important case predicted as early as next week. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is defending StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software. Twenty-eight of the world’s largest entertainment companies brought the lawsuit against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, […]
Online music distribution is set to grow significantly over the next few years, forcing industry to reconsider their business models and posing regulatory challenges to governments, according to a new OECD report on the digital music industry. A ‘re-evaluation’ of music distribution needs to happen to achieve a balance between consumers’ desire to access digital […]
"The report said it is difficult to establish a causal connection between the rise of file sharing and a drop in music sales. While the music industry’s revenues fell 20 percent from 1999 to 2003, other factors, such as illegal CD copying, might have played a role in the decline, the OECD said," according to […]
A frightening glimpse into the future of information and the impact of personalization and the web on the news we read. Be careful what you ask for. get razzled here
As TVT’s chief executive officer, Steve Gottlieb, puts it: "Manufactured pop culture is disintegrating before your eyes as the Net takes hold," and the nimbler, less risk-averse indies are best positioned to take advantage of the digital transformation. While the majors look at P2P file sharing, podcasting and other forms of digital distribution and see […]
Independent labels use networks as a way to reach consumers, not necessarily make money. "…To many independent labels, the main goal is simply to introduce music fans around the globe to little-known artists who have no chance of being played on commercial radio stations. The payoff they hope for in the long term is greater […]
"How do you predict the future? That’s easy. How do you create the future? That’s hard." Good reading here
New York – WFUV Presents – If the new world of mp3 blogs, mash-ups, downloads and ringtones boggles your mind, tune in to Let’s Get Digital as host Jen Guerra takes a musical look at all things online. The New Yorker Pop Music Critic Sasha Frere-Jones, CDBaby.com Founder Derek Sivers, Berklee College of Music Vice […]
"It is the year 2015 and you wake to a familiar tune playing softly. It gets you out of bed and makes you feel good. As you walk into the bathroom, your Personal Media Minder activates the video display in the mirror, and you watch a bit of personalized news while you get ready for […]
"It is the year 2015 and you wake to a familiar tune playing softly. It gets you out of bed and makes you feel good. As you walk into the bathroom, your Personal Media Minder activates the video display in the mirror, and you watch a bit of personalized news while you get ready for […]
"Already millions of people are subscribing to these podcasts," said Steve Jobs, predicting that an iTunes upgrade would "send it into orbit." Jobs made these comments at D: All Things Digital, hosted by Walt Mossberg from WSJ. The iTunes upgrade, expected to be released in the next few months, will feature a listing of top […]
"Like modern plumbing, the music industry could operate almost as a utility—with copyright holders able to meter usage down to how many people listened to particular songs at particular times. In such a world, the industry could live off of micropayments flowing seamlessly back to the owners of content rather than rely solely on the […]
"The latest CD sales numbers are part of an increasingly bleak picture, with the first half of 2005 likely to be a big disappointment. Disc sales have been declining for years, that is nothing new, but now it appears that the bottom could be a long ways away. A quick and dirty analysis points to […]
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