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.

Our­me­dia is get­ting a bit of inter­na­tional expo­sure, first in Span­ish (as well as here), and now we’re work­ing with the pro­ducer of a pop­u­lar tele­vi­sion news show in Bosnia about host­ing their pro­gram on Ourmedia.

We’ve also got­ten more over­seas mod­er­a­tors for Our­me­dia — but we need more women moderators!

More than 6,000 peo­ple signed up to become mem­bers of Our­me­dia in our first week — about 10 times more than we expected. We’ve tapped into a large thirst in the land for authen­tic voices, first-person nar­ra­tive and grass­roots creativity.