Our dynamic industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and Rethink Music will give you access to critical thinkers looking to explore problems and find solutions for tomorrow’s music industry.

Presented by Berklee College of Music and MIDEM, in association with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Harvard Business School.

Rethink Music will examine the business and rights challenges facing the music industry in the digital era and will formulate solutions to promote the creation and distribution of new music and other creative works. The conference will bring music industry stakeholders together with legal, business and academic experts to discuss business models for the future. Rethink Music will also examine potential changes to existing government policy and legislation in order to help the creation and distribution of musical works.

“Berklee is focused on inspiring the creation of new musical and business ideas,” says Roger Brown, Berklee College of Music President. “Part of that equation needs to be innovative models of commerce and policy that work in the 21st century era of immediately available digital information. How we accomplish these goals will have much to do with the quality of innovation we inspire. Like Berklee, Rethink Music is designed to incubate ideas that lead to breakthroughs for supporting a music industry even more vibrant, astonishing and creative than last century’s.”

“We are particularly excited to help organize the conversation around legal and policy changes to promote the interests of music creators, fans, and other stakeholders” comments Terry Fisher, Faculty Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “Technological disruption often creates room for new business models, new ways to capture value,” says Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Professor at Harvard Business School. “The conference is an important opportunity to think about ways to harness the new creativity and build novel business models that put it on a sound financial footing.”

As part of Rethink Music, the conference will solicit white papers from educators, students and the public, dealing with the economic systems and business models for music copyright and copyright policy. Berklee College of Music will award $50,000 to the best business model, with the runner-up receiving a $5,000 prize. Simultaneously, the Berkman Center will manage a call for papers seeking policy proposals that recommend changes to existing U.S. law to help those who create and distribute music cope with the challenges facing the industry.

Program
Fostering art in a world of technology
Amanda Palmer
Ben Folds
Damian Kulash, OK Go
New Big Sound
RootMusic
Licensing
Global Registry Database
Microfunding
Access and “in the cloud”
Future of Music case studies
Conversation with Joe Kennedy, Pandora
Conversation with Metric and Matt Drouin
Artists and managers
The next generation record label
The current state of copyright law
Alternative compensation schemes
Live and in your face
The future of copyright law
DIY and ancillary revenue streams
Creating a middle class of artists
U2 Manager – Paul McGuinness
Conversation with Lyor Cohen, Warner Music
Business model competition
Songwriting and Publishing
Technology, data, and music
Concerts and more

Find out more about Rethink Music :

http://www.rethink-music.com

http://www.twitter.com/rethink_music

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rethink-Music/171541336212505

This Midem 2011 series includes:

• Daren Tsui, CEO of cloud service mSpot
• Dave Kusek,  Vice President Berklee College of Music
• Naveen Salvadurai co-founder Foursquare
• Amke Block AudioMagnet
• Timo Kari and Rami Korhonen PlayMySong.
• Keith Lee, CEO and co-founder Booyah!,
• Gerd Leonhard media futurist
• Martin Rigby CEO Psonar
• Armine Saidi founder and CEO Viinyl
• Antonis Karydis CEO Mativision
• David McKinney founder Jammbox
• Anne De Kerckhove the Director at Reed Midem,
• Wilhalm Taht Marketing director Flowd
• Georg Hitzenberger Managing Director Play.fm.

Episode 71 – Midem 2011 Coverage Day 1 by digitalmusictrends

It’s a new era for the music business. The music industry is rapidly changing, the traditional gatekeepers are evolving (or disappearing), and new distribution outlets, marketing techniques, and business models are popping up all the time. For those that are educated on these changes, there is more opportunity in the “new” music business than ever. Get The Handbook Now!

Berkleemusic’s Music Business Handbook collects some of the essential knowledge from our instructors in one easy-to-navigate guide. The music industry of the future will be driven by educated, focused, entrepreneurship-minded individuals, and this handbook will prove to be a starting point in your lifelong music business education.

Topics Include:

Music Power Network provides a wide variety of music business education, tools, interviews and lots of resources for the D.I.Y. musician. The site also offers an equal wealth of information / education for producers, managers or publishers.

]]> http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/2010/03/22/networking-musician-interviews-dave-kusek/feed/ 0 http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/2010/03/18/welcome-to-the-future-new-media-economics-in-indie-rap/ http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/2010/03/18/welcome-to-the-future-new-media-economics-in-indie-rap/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:30:34 +0000 dkusek http://www.futureofmusicbook.com/?p=984 Guest Post by MC Lars

Back in 2005, my former manager at Nettwerk, Tom Gates, gave me a copy of Kusek’s “Future of Music” book.

“Read it,” Gates said.  “It might be interesting to you.”

I read the whole book in a weekend and was inspired to write a song detailing the changes Kusek proposed, many of which have come true.  It seemed crazy then.  Five years later, there has been an ideological shift made very apparent by the new generation of artists and consumers; music isn’t really a physical product anymore, it’s a service that artists provide that they are then paid for (if the service they provide has cultural and/or emotional value).

The song I wrote was called “Download This Song“, and it charted in Australia where I did TRL on MTV.  The YouTube video received a half a million plays and the single was given press in the NME, the UK’s biggest music magazine.  Afterwards, a girl in Texas who was being sued by the RIAA heard the song and contacted me.  I forwarded it to Gates.  Gates sent it to Terry McBride.  Nettwerk paid for her legal fees because one of the songs in her collection was by an artist they managed.  Clearly the ideas in the book and my song had reached a large audience.

It’s honestly somewhat eerie how much of what Kusek predicted came true.  Gone is the ineffectual A&R I described in songs like “Signing Emo” who races to find “the next hit” to get their band on the radio through payola and a $200,000 video that only recoups 10% of the time.  WTF? Gone is the idea that record labels are necessary or even always helpful.  Gone too is MTV’s agency as a music network, platinum albums, and commercial music retailers like Tower Records and Circuit City.

It might seem very bleak to the common music fan, but from an artist’s perfective, things have never been better.  In the independent hip-hop community, thousands and thousands of regional pockets of talented artists working hard to perfect and distribute their material have all popped up across America and the world.  No longer do artists aim to get $1,000,000 advances, a ridiculous and usually unrecoupable amount, but find themselves as part of an emerging middle-class that Kusek predicted would come to be.

Rap crews like Twiztid and the Psychopathic collective have used their underground and independent acumen to build empires and continue to bring tens of thousands of kids to their annual midwest hip-hop festival.  Upstate New York’s Weerd Science have become a credible and influential voice in the hip-hop underground on the strength of their 2005 debut – an impressive feet for a group with no strong label backing or touring history.   Records and regional tours have directly translated to lucrative career music for some of these artists.

The Peter Principal states that in the workplace, “each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.  Basically this means that you will keep getting promoted and promoted until you are unable to do the next job and that there is a subjectively manifested glass ceiling based on one’s ability to do their job.  This is reflected in the music scene because artists now get to become as famous as they care to be or deserve.  If the music is good, it sticks with people.

And this meritocracy is the future Kusek predicted – catalyzed, in part, by the broadband technological improvements made in the last few years.  HD YouTube videos are a click away, downloading speeds have increased and you can get any artist’s discography for free within a  few clicks.  I listen to most of my new albums on Rhapsody because it’s easier than keeping track of the stacks hard drives full of mp3s I’ve collected over the years.  There’s a Zen to music consumption now, one of the new simplicity of it all.

And for the record, I’m living proof that downloading doesn’t hurt artists.  Without the advent of torrents, kids can quickly get any of my albums for free at any time from basically anywhere.  And that’s awesome!  Kids have my albums, even the rare out-of-print ones, because they’ve found them for free online.  Some of them decide to help support me in other ways by buying t-shirts or getting the occasional track from iTunes, which adds up if the net is wide enough.  I then pay my bills with digital sales, college gigs, and international touring.

I can’t buy a mansion in Hollywood, but that was never the goal.  I get by comfortably and will keep making music until I die.  High five!  What more could I ask for?  The 14 year old version of myself would be very proud of how I turned out at 27.

“Music was a product, now it is a service”.

Check out a new favorite crew of mine from South Africa, Die Antwoord, luminaries in the Johannesburg “zef-rap” scene.  In a truly viral word-of-mouth fashion, another artist I’d worked with (Tina Root from Switchblade Symphony) sent me the YouTube link.

“You’ll like this,” she said. “It’s different.”  She was right.

I checked out their “Enter the Ninja” video – the raps were tight, the chorus was very catchy, the visuals were unique, and the editing was dope!  I then researched zef-rap and learned that it is an international postmodern culture that takes every regional hip-hop tradition I could imagine and amalgamates it into one thing.  It’s hip-hop of the future that I had found by the web from a colleague.

This is how it “zef” a uniquely postmodern hip-hop form: In one video, a rapper named Jack Parow “ghostrides” his car, dancing along side of it.  This is a hip-hop tradition that was popularized in the Bay Area in the last decade, a reflection of the car culture being so integral to “hyphy” rappers like E-40 and Mac Dre.  Zef-rap incorporates many regional hip-hop movements into one genre, which is why I’m so in love with it these days!  Would I have heard of this genre otherwise?  Probably not.  It’s all because of this viral video my friend sent.  Now I can’t stop talking about them.

When kids ask me how I got into music, I always tell them this; if you want to have a career in indie hip-hop or any other genre of music these days, you need to be dedicated, come original, and work on building your brand as something real and human that people can relate to.  Don’t expect to make money on albums, labels are essentially just banks that help promote artists as brands, with CDs being their main promotional tool.

Kusek gave me hope when I was starting out that the playing field would be leveled if you believe in your art.  The punk rock ethics that I grew up with as a teenager in the late 90s are very conducive to the new culture of music listening and consumption.

I’d also like to thank Dave for his support through the years and also for getting me into classes at the Berklee College of Music in 2007 – I’ve learned a lot from him and trust you all can too.

Much respect to anyone working to make a career in music.

Welcome to the future!

MC Lars

mclars.tv
mclars.com
comics.mclars.com

I originally published this article in Forbes Magazine nearly 4 years ago.

“More people are consuming music today than ever before, yet very few of them are paying for it. The music recording industry blames file sharing for a downturn in CD sales and, with the publishing companies, has tried its best to litigate this behavior out of existence, rather than try to monetize the conduct of music fans. These efforts are fingers in a dike that is about to burst. Digital media are interactive, and people want music that they can burn to CDs, share and use as they wish. The music industry should instead look at turning this consumer phenomenon into a steady stream of cash–lots of it.

The industry ought to establish a “music utility” approach to the distribution and marketing of interactive digital music, modeled after the water, gas and electricity utility systems. It should be done voluntarily to work best for all parties, or it may eventually be legislated through a compulsory license provision.

Under a plan colleague Gerd Leonhard and I propose, con-sumers would pay a flat music licensing fee of $3 to $5 a month as part of a subscription to an Internet service provider, cellular network, digital cable service wireless carrier or other digital network provider. This fee would let people download and listen to as much music as they care to, from a vast library of files available across the networks.

These fees would result in a huge river of money. With approximately 200 million people connected to a digital network in the U.S., the potential annual revenue stream for a music utility model could be somewhere between $7 billion and $12 billion for the basic service. That is already comparable in size to the existing U.S. recorded music market, which in 2003 was $12 billion at retail, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. This basic service would be augmented with various opportunities, including packages of premium content, live concerts, new releases, artist channels, custom compilations and more. The revenue potential of these premium sources is enormous, too.

How would this money be divvied up? We propose that the industry voluntarily establish a “music utility license” for the interactive use of digital music. This license would compensate all rights holders, including the record labels and artists (for the master recording) as well as publishers and composers (for the underlying composition), with the license fee to be split in half between the owners of the sound recording and the owners of the composition, after deducting a percentage for the digital network providers. This license would be available to anyone willing to implement its terms. The digital network companies would be required to track and report which music had been used, by employing existing digital identification and tracking technologies.

There is already precedence for such a flat-fee system in cable television and in the utility-like models of public broadcasting in Europe. Streaming digital music is already provided in basic cable plans. Cable television itself at first resisted this model, but its economics eventually led to a larger market, providing more consumer choice and more revenue streams overall. Old media almost never die. Cable television did not replace broadcast television; instead, it expanded the market dramatically, by letting video flow like water into new revenue streams–instead of down the drain.

Certainly a music utility would be a radical and complex undertaking, and there are many important details to negotiate, such as the exact nature of the license, how the funds would be administered, the specific tracking method, what collection of technologies would be employed and others. Yet there are inventors and technologists outside the mainstream music business hard at work trying to figure out how to make this happen. It’s time for the main players in the music business today, namely the large record publishers, to cooperate with the inventors and jointly create a future for music where the money really flows and the global market for music can grow from $32 billion to as much as $100 billion.”

Read the original article from Forbes here, published in 2005.

Today this idea is closer to reality than you might think.  The major labels have seen their revenues cut nearly in half from their peak, and paid digital downloads and advertising models have not grown to contribute nearly the decline in CD sales.  The labels are in a very tough position and are looking at the utility model as perhaps their only remaining path to survival.  The pain has finally gotten too much to bear.

Choruss is a new company spearheaded by Jim Griffin, and incubated by Warner Music Group whose mission is to “build a sustainable music subscription platform providing unlimited access to music for a flat monthly fee”.  Choruss has been diligently acquiring the required licenses from all the “major labels”, independent labels including aggregators A2IM and Merlin and the National Music Publishers Association.  The company has been granted one-year licenses for up to seven universities to offer subscription services for unlimited, DRM-free downloads as a proof of concept.  This trial is set to begin in 2010.

Stay tuned for more info…

In a 2002 New York Times article, David Bowie said that “music itself is going to become like running water or electricity….it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what is going to happen.” Now, seven years later, the music industry has continued its rapid metamorphosis. Often referred to as an industry in crisis, coming up Where We Live, we’ll be talking with writers and innovators who say the business of making music has never been better. Ignore the closed up Virgin MegaStore in cities across the country—listening to and making music is still big business. David Kusek, author of The Future of Music: Manifestor for the Digital Music Revolution joins us to talk about the new truths that govern the music world. Also, The founders of Pandora and TuneCore chime in and we’ll be joined in-studio by WNPR’s own Anthony Fantano. From the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network.