Andrew Keen

So has the Internet been the best or the worst of things for the music industry? Some musicians, like Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery, argue the latter; while some technologists,…

The most profound of all the digital disruptions that have occurred over the last 20 years has been the breach in trust between the creative artist and audience. It’s this…

Executives at the big music labels tend to get a bad rap. But some of the most innovative people in the music business began their careers at the labels. Take,…

While the early history of the Internet is littered with the corpses of music start-ups, not all digital music companies have failed. Take, for example, Gracenote. Founded in 1998, the…

12 months ago at SFMusicTech, I talked to StageIt founder and CEO Evan Lowenstein about what he called “the new intimacy economy”. And last week at SFMusicTech, I met again…

So maybe there really is a sensible middle ground in the music business – somewhere between David Lowery’s pessimism and Bram Cohen’s blind faith in our digital future. That future…

Not everyone agrees with BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen that the Internet has been good for the musician. Indeed, some musicians think the exact reverse. Take, for example, David Lowery, the…

I’ve been waiting for this one. Bram Cohen is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of the P2P file sharing service BitTorrent. And he may also be one of the guys…

Most of us know the guitarist and singer-songwriter Bob Weir as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. But Weir is also the founder of Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI), a…

Founded just seven and a half years ago, Glam Media is one of Silicon Valley’s few media success stories. Beginning in the women’s interest vertical and expanding to entertainment, health…

The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their “logical next play” – a vertical…

Sometimes it’s the quiet ones who end up doing the most damage. I always thought of Larry Downes, the co-author of the mega-selling Unleashing the Killer App, as an unusually…

My own views about SOPA and the need to protect online intellectual property are well-known. But even I acknowledge that SOPA was a flawed bill that didn’t represent a viable…

There are few more articulate supporters of high speed broadband access than Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper. Not only does he think Americans should have the right to high quality broadband,…

It’s always nice to see a small, plucky start-up take on the big guys and not only survive but also prosper. My excellent Santa Rosa based ISP Sonic.net is doing…

It was, of course, inevitable. After book after book explaining the importance of being forward, of aggressively networking and noisily self-promoting ourselves, the correction has finally arrived. And it comes…

Earlier this week, Facebook announced changes to its Open Graph which have huge implications to the social ecommerce platform Payvment. The two year-old Palo Alto based start-up, which already manages…

Walter Isaacson has unleashed a torrent of new books about Steve Jobs and Apple. But nobody has written anything quite like Caleb Melby’s The Zen of Steve Jobs, a graphic…

Google’s “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) continues to jeopardize the company’s world. It’s a moral minus, Alexia says. Others have gone further – saying that SPYW fundamentally compromises Google as…

The more we know about Apple, it seems, the less we really know. According to the journalist and writer Adam Lashinsky, America’s most admired company is also America’s least understandable…

After Walter Isaacson’s magnum opus, do we really need yet another book about Apple? Yes, I think we do. Whereas Isaacson wrote the authorized biography of Jobs, the journalist and…

Ed Schmit’s AT&T Developer Program was busy this week at CES. Not only did they run an innovative Hackathon, but they also announced the winner of their $20,000 Power the…

As Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute noted in a recent report about “scale and innovation”, today’s digital economy favors large companies because growth depends to the establishment of…

One of the most interesting events at CES earlier this week was the AT&T Developer Summit which not only featured a guest appearance a fist pumping/back slapping Steve Ballmer, but…

So who do you trust? Given the decline in trust and the rise of protest movements like the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, the chances are…

David Weinberger, the co-author of the iconic Cluetrain Manifesto, has just released another stunningly profound book. In Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts,…

Happy New Year everyone! And to celebrate the beginning of 2012, I invited the noted trendologist, Marian Salzman, the author of the excellent Little Book of Nexts, into our New…

It’s the last Friday in 2011 and the new year is imminent. So what were the top technological, cultural and economic trends in 2011? What shaped a year that some…

While 2011 is almost over, the year has only really just begun in terms of determining its historical significance. 2011 wasn’t, of course, just another year. Like 1989, 1968, 1917…

We all know that not much happens in the week between Christmas and the New Year. But less well know is how little has happened culturally in the last twenty years.…