The Music Think Tank includes:
Andrew Dubber - New Music Strategies
Andrew is the Senior Lecturer in Music Industries at Birmingham City University, and is a researcher in online music. He is an author, speaker, and consultant in the area of online music entrepreneurship. He also blogs about the music industries online at New Music Strategies.
Derek Sivers - CD Baby
Derek Sivers is founder, president, and programmer of CD Baby and HostBaby. A professional musician since 1987, Derek started CD Baby by accident in 1998, when he was selling his own CD on his website, and offered to let his fellow musicians use his service, too. As this hobby grew, he refused all investors and advertising, choosing to grow slowly and quietly during the dot-com boom and bust. Now CD Baby is the largest seller of independent CDs on the web, with over $60M in sales for over 200,000 musician clients.
Anthony Volodkin - Hype Machine
Anthony is the founder of the music blog aggregator, the Hype Machine.
Bruce Warila - Unsprung Media
Bruce has been periodically working on interactive, bundled digital assets as an alternative to the MP3 since 2002. He is currently researching the adoption of, and the business models for, music discovery and recommendation technology and services. Bruce blogs about the music industry at Unsprung Media.
Craig Hamilton - Friends of the Stars
Craig is a musician, songwriter, singer and one part of Friends of the Stars - a country/folk band from Birmingham, UK. They release their records (and those of others) online. Craig also provides online music business assistance to record labels and musicians on a consultancy basis.
Bob Baker - Indie Music Promotion
Bob is an author and indie musician (and now Berklee Music online faculty member) dedicated to showing musicians of all kinds how to get exposure, connect with fans, make more money, and empower themselves. His books include the "Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook" and many others. He publishes a blog, ezine, podcast and video clips at TheBuzzFactor.com.
Ariel Hyatt - CyberPR
Ariel started Ariel Publicity, a traditional music PR firm in 1996. After 10 years of supporting mostly indie artists (1100 of them) she took the company 100% digital and renamed it Cyber PR, slashed her rates to 1/10 of what she used to charge and quadrupled her client base - and has been having a blast ever since! She is the author of 'Boost Your Music Career in 10 Steps' and runs workshops and seminars on music promotion.
Rhodri Marsden - The Independent
Having managed Pere Ubu, Laibach, Spearmint, The Band Of Holy Joy and others, and arranged tours of Eastern Europe for acts including Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins and Motorhead, Rhodri became the technology columnist for The Independent after they rang him and asked if he knew what an MP3 was. Shortly afterwards he joined Scritti Politti after bumping into Green Gartside in a London pub, who asked if Rhodri knew anyone who played keyboards. Last year The Independent challenged Rhodri to "become a popstar on the internet in 30 days", and write it up over several thousand words for their cover story. He lost a load of money, got 1/4 million views on YouTube and obviously failed to become a popstar.
Laurence Trifon - Indie Musician
Laurence is one half of the electronic music group Trifonic. Before Trifonic became a full-time operation in 2007, Laurence worked as an economic analyst for several years after graduating from Stanford University. He currently lives in San Francisco, CA.
Syd Schwartz - Capitol Records
Syd Schwartz is Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy for the Capitol Music Group (Capitol & Virgin Records). An 18 year veteran of the music industry who has learned the business from the cash register on up, he remains a music and technology junkie and occasionally finds time to blog at Jazz Odyssey. He is also involved with the Mockingbird Foundation, a non-profit organization that raises funds to support music education for children.
Marco Raaphorst - Melodiefabriek
Marco is a public speaker, consultant, musician, Creative Commons advocate and promoter of free music on his personal blog (Dutch language site). He was a winner of the Dutch bloggies in 2007 and is nominated again in 2008. His professional site, Melodiefabriek is in English.
Mark Ramsey - Mercury Radio Research & hear2.0
Mark Ramsey is president of Mercury Radio Research, a major radio industry research and consulting firm and hear2.0, a trend-deciphering blog and new media strategy company with an audio emphasis. Mark is a trusted partner to many radio industry and allied firms. Clients have ranged from CBS to Bonneville Broadcasting, from XM to Sirius, from EA Games to OurStage.com.
Jed Carlson - ReverbNation
Jed is Co-Founder and COO of ReverbNation. ReverbNation provides cross-platform Fan Relationship Management solutions to over 170,000 musicians, managers, labels and venues worldwide. Jed is also the inventor of Band Equity(TM), which is a unique and powerful system for tracking the value of an artist's brand across all medias and social networks. Jed holds undergraduate degrees from Bowdoin College and an MBA from Duke University.
