IT Conversations interviews Gerd Leonhard and Dave Kusek, authors of the new book The Future of Music Book. You can download or stream it by going here.

The music-industry incumbents are threatened by the new technologies of music distribution. How are they reacting, and how are musicians using the Internet on their own to make more money for themselves? In this interview with two music-industry insiders, Dave Slusher discovers the current state of digital music and possible courses for the future. David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard are the authors of the new book "The Future of Music" from Berklee Press. This book examines the assumptions built into the current music industry and its distribution mechanisms, discusses ways in which the ease of digital distribution and P2P technologies could be tapped, examines alternate payment mechanisms and licensing schemes, and looks to the future of music creation.

David Kusek is a musician, and at the age of nineteen he co-invented electronic drums at Synare, which helped ignite the disco era. He is also a co-developer of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard that opened up electronic music to literally millions of people and is currently vice-president of Berklee Music. Gerd Leonhard is a music futurist and entrepeneur, former CEO of LicenseMusic.com ,a company that revolutionized music licensing, reducing the average transaction time for music licenses from six weeks to two hours. He is currently CEO of the ThinkAndLink, a boutique advisory agency based in Basel, Switzerland and San Francisco."

I just accepted an invitation to Yahoo 360. Looking forward to checking it out in detail. It's a combination social networking/blogging platform that's still in beta. From what I hear, it's going to be a very big deal.

Like Om Malik says, Yahoo has got its back. And the blogosphere seems to agree.

Cross-posted to Social Media blog.

I just accepted an invitation to Yahoo 360. Looking forward to checking it out in detail. It's a combination social networking/blogging platform that's still in beta. From what I hear, it's going to be a very big deal.

Like Om Malik says, Yahoo has got its back. And the blogosphere seems to agree.

I've been trying to find time to blog the announcement of BlogNashville, which the organizers had originally planned to call BloggerCon Nashville. It'll be held May 5-6-7, and I'm on a blogging & journalism panel (natch) with Glenn Reynolds, Bill Hobbs and Linda Seebach. Glenn covers the bases well:

BLOGNASHVILLE , a big blog conference that's in, you guessed it, Nashville, is now open for registration. Here's a link to the BlogNashville Blog and here's the schedule. I'll be there, and so will J.D. Lasica, Linda Seebach, Dan Gillmor, Bill Hobbs, Robin Burk, Ed Cone, Mark Glaser, LaShawn Barber, Rebecca McKinnon, and a host of others.

But first, I'll be speaking a week from Friday at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin Texas. Look me up if you plan to attend either event.

NY Times: Blockbuster and Wal-mart go after Netflix.

I hope they lose.

This afternoon I participated in a well-spent hourlong IRC chat with some of the leading video bloggers on the videoblogging mailing list, now at 450 members strong on Yahoo Groups.

It's funny how the intimacy and informality of being in a virtual room with a dozen or so folks feels different than seeing your words out there in cold digits on the Web. In any event, here's the pointer to mediacasting, and the transcript is here.

MSNBC columnist Michael Rogers (who headed up Newsweek's online news department for years) has part 2 of his look at vlogs (including a nice mention of Ourmedia):

Vlogs: Next big thing or niche experiment?. Readers respond to Practical Futurist column.

The answer is surely somewhere in between.

Sometimes it's interesting to see what they're saying about vlogging (after "huh"?) out in the heartland.

First, an interesting new place to post video has now launched: the long-awaited Ourmedia.org. It’s an open-source citizen-journalist project masterminded by veteran new-media writer JD Lasica and the even more veteran multimedia pioneer Marc Canter (there are probably kids learning Director today who weren’t born when Marc created its earliest incarnation years ago in San Francisco). Ourmedia had 20,000 visitors its first day, and signed up 3,000 members in its first 3 days and is definitely worth watching.

CNET Asia: Yahoo has added a feature that lets people search content that's been licensed through Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that specializes in copyrighting material so that it's available for some reuse.

It's here: http://search.yahoo.com/cc

Good move. You have to wonder why the other search engines are twiddling their thumbs.

San Jose Merc:

Former vice presidential candidate John Edwards this week released his first podcast, an online audio recording featuring Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, chatting about the NCAA basketball tournament, her breast cancer treatments, his opposition to President Bush's Social Security plans and (pander alert) his respect for bloggers.

Edwards, who is running a poverty center at the University of North Carolina and is believed to be pondering another run for the White House, wasn't known for his tech savvy during his 2004 campaign. But he is now one of the few politicians to venture into the world of podcasting.

Podcasting is not just for Democrats.

The Republican National Committee has released its own podcasts on www.gop.com -- although they will sound familiar to anyone who has watched the party's Web video series ``Off the Record.'' They are the audio portions of those interviews with GOP politicians.