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.
Marketing and promoting your music is a task every musician has to face throughout their career. But it’s also the one thing many musicians wish they never had to do again. With all the noise out there it can really feel like no one’s even listening to you. So how do you stand out and […]
Email is one of the best ways to get in touch with your fans and promote your music these days. But make no mistake, this isn’t a 100% thing. Most people get hundreds of emails per day. The big question is, how do you stand out? How do you make sure your fans are clicking […]
Content Marketing for Creative Entrepreneurs This week, we are holding live training on content marketing and how to build and connect with an audience around your creative work. What Exactly is Content Marketing? I want you to think of content marketing as pulling your fans and audience in with interesting and engaging content (instead of pushing […]
With the DIY revolution and the rise of the music middle class in today’s music industry, it’s really easy to get caught up in all the business and music promotion stuff. But despite all the tools and resources and services at your fingertips online that can potentially get your music in front of a huge […]
An Interview with Jensen Reed on the Viral Music Video Back to the 90s It’s the big question on most musicians minds… How do you create that perfect viral music video? One that can launch your career forward and raise awareness for you and your music. New Artist Model member Jensen Reed found the right […]
You’ve probably heard this a thousand times before… as a musician, you need to have a website. Sure, it’s easy enough to put together a website for your music with all the easy website builders available today, but making a REALLY EFFECTIVE website? One that will help you actually engage with your fans and sell […]
Let’s talk about promoting your music on social media. More specifically making the task of promoting your music on social media not suck. I mean, who has time to spend hours coming up with social media posts to promote your music on Facebook and Twitter? The secret is NOT doing more to promote your music. […]
For a lot of musicians, there’s a bit of a love/hate relationship going on with cover songs. On one side of the equation, it’s fun and insightful to cover other people’s songs. And if you pick the right song, fans will really go crazy when they hear a classic tune. On the other side, covers […]
When it comes to band practice, practice only makes perfect if you use your time efficiently. Many bands get together with the initial intention to practice for a few hours, but get distracted and goof off, resulting in little or no progress. And other times we end up just playing what’s comfortable instead of pushing […]
Emailing music bloggers, music venues to book gigs, and other industry people like press outlets and record label execs is just downright frustrating for a lot of indie musicians. More often than not, you put all this time into your emails, and then when you hit the send button, you never even get a response. […]
Music merchandise is a great way to make money as a musician and express your personality as an artist, so it makes sense to have some creative band merch ideas that will make you stand out from the sea of band tees out there. Of course, there are those standard band merch items every musician should […]
Recently, I was interviewed by Joanna Penn, self-published author and indie advocate and educator for writers, about the music business and the changes that have occurred in the music industry which preceded the shift in digital publishing: Physical to digital formats and now streaming and micro-payments; musicians choosing to go indie instead of joining big labels; […]
Technology. It’s provided a lot of really cool opportunities for musicians. I mean, now you can create incredible quality music with your laptop, you can release that music to the world with the click of a button, and you can connect with a global fanbase from your home. But – and this is the big […]
Going on tour is a big step in your career as a musician. It’s a great way to monetize your existing fans and reach new fans. But, it’s also possible that your first tour may not go exactly as planned, so you need to prepare accordingly. Going on tour can be a lot of fun, but […]
Social media is great for musicians – it gives you the ability to interact with your fans and promote your music to a well-targeted audience. Even with all of the benefits, social media sites come and go. However, one thing seems to remain constant – email. This is why the most important asset you’ll ever have […]
Images are one of the most engaging types of content. It’s been proven time and time again that social posts that include images will usually get more likes and comments than plain text posts. With that in mind, most everything you put out there to raise awareness for your music – from blog posts to […]
Try these music theory tricks at your live shows Booking a gig is just the first step. NOW you need to focus on putting on a great show that will draw a big crowd and get you booked again. It’s easy to feel frustrated with your live shows and the sound your band is getting. Nothing […]
Email is a big topic (which is why we dedicated an entire module to it in the Music Power Tools course), and it’s something that a lot of musicians put off. But I’m here to tell you that email doesn’t have to be scary, time-consuming, or intimidating. Instead of thinking big picture, narrow it down […]
Try out these music theory tricks Songwriting is often simultaneously one of the most magical and frustrating parts of being a musician. Sometimes, the best songs seem to appear in our heads without prompting and demand to be written down before they disappear, while other times great songs take forever to finish and are nothing […]
Songwriting is often a mysterious, transcendental experience when it is going well. It can also be one of the most challenging and frustrating creative experiences in music. Often, songwriting seems almost like a spiritual place we must magically arrive at through some sort of weird set of unexpected and inspirational circumstances – but it is […]
Music theory is wonderful, exciting, and enormously useful. But for many musicians who received any kind of music theory education growing up, the experience is usually exactly the opposite. Music theory classes can feel one step removed from strict math classes where the concepts never really seem to apply to “real life.” But have no fear – […]
Image via Depositphotos Twitter is a great channel for promoting your music and engaging your fans online. However, for it to be effective, you need to get more Twitter followers. First off – what you should not do. Don’t buy followers unethically online and risk getting your account banned, or buy ads to promote your […]
Image via Stocksy First thing that comes to mind when thinking about promoting your music is probably social media, right? Social media breaks down so many barriers for indie musicians to reach and communicate with an audience – and that’s awesome! But sometimes it’s easy to forget about the in-person, experiential facet of music. That […]
Know Your Craft So here you are again. Sitting with your instrument trying to learn or create another song – but the process is taking forever! Every new song you learn or write feels like starting from square one with a totally blank slate. What can you do? Well as it turns out, theory can […]
Get the Music Out of Your Head We all have found ourselves hearing something in our head that sounds so great that we have to play it and get it down on paper. However, once we find ourselves there, the next step of actually getting what we are hearing into a form that we can use often […]
Break Out of Your Old Music Habits One of the greatest challenges any musician faces is the plateau. We all know what it is like. You finally start regularly practicing, you make some strong progress with a few things that you always wanted to learn, and then all of a sudden…you stop improving. Every time […]
How to Jam and Play With Anybody Trust Your Ear One of the hardest barriers to jumping in and playing with other people is the perception that there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to play music. This perception has come from a lot of places, but it is often very misleading. Some of […]
When you pay attention to everything that’s going on around you, you’ll be surprised what you hear. Stop guessing what the chords might be Instead, learn about keys and harmonic function. This will take enormous amounts of guesswork out of the process. You don’t have to try twenty chords if you know that it can […]
Time, Tonality and Harmony We all want to improve as musicians, but it can be hard to identify clear ways to improve. Just starting to practice on a regular basis can help you enormously, but it can also be a real challenge. Many times it’s hard to decide what to practice when you finally sit […]
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