Speakers on October 9, 2012
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Speakers on October 9, 2012 Nic Adler The Roxy, Adler Integrated After years as a band manager, promoter, and restauranteur, Nic took the helm at The Roxy in 1998. An entrepreneur and community builder, Nic was drawn to the cutting edge concepts he found in the burgeoning field of social media. In 2007 he launched a blog that went on to win The VH-1 Rock Honors Award for Best Music Venue Website. Always an early adaptor, Nic began tweeting in 2008 and is now the #1 Music Venue on Twitter and Facebook in the world. As his social media program grew, Nic began to see the importance of being a part of the larger community of the Sunset Strip and the City of West Hollywood. Nic is co-producer of the Sunset Strip Music Festival, which draws over 30,000 music fans to the city every August and celebrates the Strip’s legacy as it highlights some of music’s newest talent. He is Vice President of the Sunset Strip Business Association and a regular at City Council meetings where he is leading efforts to bring the community together. Featured in the New York Times, Mashable,TechCrunch, Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, and cover stories in LABJ, Venues Today and Nightclub and Bar Magazine, Nic is reinventing his club, his street and eventually his city using the fundamental concepts of community building inherent in social media. Follow Nic on Twitter: @nicadler and @theroxy Anna Anisin 4sync, CEO Kevin Arnold Darryl Ballantyne LyricFind, CEO & FounderAt LyricFind, Darryl is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the company, including licensing and distribution. Darryl pioneered the digital lyrics space, successfully negotiating the first-ever mass lyrics licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing in 2005. Darryl Ballantyne originally conceived LyricFind in 2000 with Mohamed Moutadayne and Chris Book at Ontario’s University of Waterloo to be the largest, most accurate destination for lyrics on the Internet. Officially launched in 2004, the company pioneered the licensed digital lyrics space, successfully negotiating the first-ever mass lyrics licensing deal with EMI Music Publishing in 2005. Since then, Darryl has grown LyricFind to be the largest legal, licensed lyrics database in the world, with millions of licensed tracks available representing thousands of publishers. LyricFind is also the first lyrics service to have true worldwide rights from all major music publishers (and many more). LyricFind has established licensing and content relationships with over 2,700 music publishers, Rovi, The Harry Fox Agency, The Echo Nest, and many more. The company now delivers services to over 1,000 web sites and mobile applications that want to enhance their music products with lyrics, including Microsoft’s Bing, Lyrics.com, Slacker, Shazam, SoundHound, LyricsMode, SongMeanings, Universal Music, and mSpot. In addition, LyricFind offers two direct to consumer mobile applications, Lyrics Lite and Lyrics Pro for the iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry Playbook platforms. As an authority on licensing and digital content, Darryl has spoken at industry events including SF Music Tech, Canadian Music Week, Music & Media Finland, Digital Music Forum East and West, New Music Seminar, and many more. Before launching LyricFind, Darryl was Manager of Digital Development & Distribution at EMI Music in Los Angeles, where he was involved in deals with companies such as MusicMatch, Napster, and iTunes. Darryl earned a Bachelor of Mathematics with a Business minor from the University of Waterloo. Follow on Twitter: @DBToronto John Battelle Federated Media Publishing, Founder and Executive Chairman John Battelle founded and currently serves as Executive Chairman of Federated Media Publishing, which now ranks as one of the top properties on the Web. Battelle was also the co-founder, Executive Producer and Program Chair of the Web 2 Summit. Battelle maintains Searchblog, an ongoing daily site, which covers the intersection of media, technology, and culture at www.battellemedia.com. Battelle is also an entrepreneur, author and journalist. Best known for his work creating media properties, Battelle was Chairman and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to that, he was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. Previously, Battelle occupied the Bloomberg chair in Business Journalism for the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an expert in the field of media and technology, and has appeared on national and international news channels including CBS, BBC, CNN, PBS, Discovery, and CNBC. Battelle was a founding Board member of the Online Publishers Association and currently sits on the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and was for nine years active on the Board of his children’s school. Battelle’s honors and awards include: “Global Leader for Tomorrow” and “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; finalist rank in the “Entrepreneur of the Year” competition by Ernst & Young; “Innovator – One of Ten Best Marketers in the Business” by Advertising Age; and one of the “Most Important People on The Web” by PC World. Battelle holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2005 Battelle authored ‘The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture’ (Penguin/Portfolio), an international bestseller published in more than 25 languages. His new book entitled ‘What We Hath Wrought’ is due out in 2013. Follow John on Twitter: @JohnBattelle Idan Beck Incident, CEO and Founder Idan Beck is the CEO and founder of Incident, a music technology company focused on creating fun, interactive music hardware and software that is approachable to anyone, regardless of experience. In 2009, Beck began hacking away in his parents’ Cupertino garage on a new kind of guitar that would fuse his love of electronic music production with the instrument he had spent more than half his life playing. As the technology progressed from an idea into a product, the gTar was born and he founded Incident to bring it to market. The gTar was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in May 2012, placing 2nd in the Startup Battlefield and receiving coverage and praise from Wired, Rolling Stone, Engadget, CNN Money, and more. Incident simultaneously launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the first batch of mass-production units, breaking through a $100k goal in just over 12 hours and eventually raising $353,000. The first batch of gTars are currently in production. Prior to founding Incident, Beck worked as a software developer at Microsoft working on consumer products. He received his BS and M.Eng in Electrical Computer Engineering from Cornell University. In his spare time, he writes electronic music and has had several songs reach the Beatport Top 100 Chart. He now resides in San Francisco with his girlfriend Stacey and their pet cat Indy. Follow Idan on Twitter: @idanbeck Jonathan Bender COO, SoundExchange Jon brings more than 20 years of music industry business and management expertise to his position at SoundExchange. Over the years, Jon has served in senior operational roles at Concord Music Group, Universal Music Group, and EMI Music. Jon was senior vice president, operations, IT and digital development at Concord, one of the fastest growing independent label groups in the world. In this role, he designed and managed a consolidated digital infrastructure to host and distribute the artist catalogs of the three combined companies: Concord Records, Fantasy Records and Telarc International. He also led the integration of all physical product operations and revamped all of the group’s online properties. Before joining CMG, Jon spent seven years with Universal Music Group, most recently as vice president, digital asset management and logistics. In this role, he served as team leader for building of the music industry’s first e-commerce distribution infrastructure, and converted production operations from physical assets to digital, savings millions annually. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Follow Jon on Twitter: @soundexchange Lyrics Born Amongst the dusty records of UC Davis’ KDVS college radio station, Tom Shimura, who currently makes records as Lyrics Born, found too much to love. Sandwiched between gatefold LPs, 12-inch singles, dub versions and white-labels was a reservoir of inspiration that he would draw on for the following decades. That was then. This is now. Since his college days, Bay Area-native Lyrics Born’s raw, authentic talent has been polished to a gleaming beacon of originality in a time when it’s needed most, and its release marks a new era of label relations. “The old model is dead, you can’t just put it out and expect people to get it”, explains LB, and the statement could easily be applied to his sound or his approach to marketing the finished product. Lyrics Born has gone about the creation of his latest effort, As U Were, in a less-than-conventional manner. One defining characteristic of his sound thus far has been that it can be described as unequivocally fun, and this remains true of As U Were. However, LB does routinely peel back the gregarious exterior to reveal a contemplative everyman, and it’s times like this that his true artistry is apparent. “It’s at the point in my career where I’ve been through a lot, fun and not so fun. I think I’m dealing with a lot issues that are more mature than the last few albums, from abandonment to betrayal to incredible joy”. He voices these sentiments prominently on the lead single “Lies x 3”, a driving, heartfelt plead for truth.