Over 700 people attended including many luminaries from the Open Software world and top academic institutions like Harvard, Yale, MIT and NYU. One of the significant messages of the conference was the importance of maintaining and growing open standards vs. “walled gardens” or closed systems that serve the economic goals of the owner of the proprietary technology, but stifle creativity and sharing of culture that potentially would raise the “sea level” to float everyone’s boats.

There are many lessons being learned by this community that offer a better path to the future of the music industry and I hope to help to build a bridge between these communities. We have already seen that video is incredibly important to the communication between the artists and the fan in the music industry. As Seth Godin has said, you cannot pirate interactivity. The new horizons that people are pursuing in the Open Video movement have a lot to say about how artists in the music industry can nurture and grow the interaction with their fans. I believe that video interaction can become a key element offering new ways to monetize that relationship in an honest way that fans respect and that could offer sustainable alternatives to the failures that have resulted from clinging to old business models.

One of the primary organizers of the conference was Kaltura, whose staff were out in force helping to insure the success of the conference. I got to meet both Ron Yekutiel, CEO and Dr. Michal Tsur, President of Kaltura. I am very impressed by the way they have applied the Freemium Business Model. This term, Freemium, was coined by Fred Wilson and discussed widely by Chris Anderson. I would love to hear from Open Source developers who would be interested in helping me to follow the example of Kaltura and considering whether and how to offer Loud Feed technology as Open Source, thus increasing the likelihood of setting the standards so badly needed to provide things like better metadata and decentralized interoperability for digital music distribution.

Here is one of what will shortly be many videos available from the Open Video Conference:

Video needs to be uploaded again.

My first day at MidemNet I got to speak with Gerd Leonhard, author of the now classic The Future of Music.Gerd’s newest book is The End of Control,

the tough issue of control emerges, again and again, as the key contention point within TV companies, publishers, record labels, and broadcasters: How can a commercial venture that is based on so-called “intellectual property” thrive and prosper in an environment that seems to continuously and progressively remove control from the creators/owners/providers of content, and hands it over to the people formerly known as consumers (aka the users), effectively making them more powerful every single day? 

When I spoke with Gerd, I mentioned that while I purchased the “Future of Music” book, I had actually first listened to the free podcast of the book instead of reading it. I’m so busy these days, I listened to chapter after chapter while doing other things like laundry, cooking, walking and even waiting a couple of hours for President Bill Clinton to speak at the University of Michigan commencement ceremonies last year. I was able to take notes while listening. I then went back and used the physical book as a way to more easily get exact quotes for my staff and details for my Loud Feed business plan. So, physical artifacts like books, can still be useful in the “digital future” which has already begun for so many of us, but still needs to be understood better by those who seek to figure out business models that work.Included in The End of Control web site is an interesting glossary of terms including:

Usator: a favorite Gerd mashup of user and creator, i.e., a person who may consume more or less passively (if there is any such thing anymore) but also “creates” content by engaging in activities such as blogging or guest-commenting, adding some original content to a webpage, publishing a photo, changing the look and feel of a profile page, or adding a widget. In general, this is a catch-all term that reflects how hard it has become to define what makes someone a “creator” versus a plain user who also happens to contribute. 

With respect to the effect of social networking on the future of music Gerd has this to say:

Social networks are becoming the new radio and stand to have more influence over music trends (and commerce) than MTV ever had; (digital) radio is fast turning into a music retailer and distributor; and smart, software-based taste-making agents are set to become a standard in digital music.