Music Website Gurus Panel 

"Compares and contrasts the efforts of big budget and digital media outlets with music websites that started with a URL and a dream"

Panelists: Scott Boyd, former Managing Director of AOL Music , now General Manager of Music at Buzznet.com 

John Kuch, filling in for Bill Nguyen, Founder of Lala.com

John Lenac, Head of Programming & Label Relations at Yahoo! Music

Sean Adams, Founder/President of Drowned in Sound UK’s equivalent of Pitchfork

Wesley Verhoeve, Founder of Hip Hop Blog, Sit Down Stand Up

Moderator: Michael Copeland, Senior Writer for Business 2.0 Magazine

Points raised: The music business sites and players have started catering to the user, bringing content to them, particularly in the realm of widgets and Facebook applications, circumventing the need for users to have to go to a new site. 20 years ago, the only way anyone would have been likely to hear about a non-major band playing a show would have been on something like a flyer. The Internet allows the smaller bands to distribute their information that much more effectively and widely.

 Questions raised: How effectively will allowing users to stream full albums prompt commerce (in Lala’s case)? How will the role of music journalism/editorializing change as/if music online communities grow (hehe as if)? How does a tech-savy band, capable of promoting themselves online, stand out from the noise of all the other bands who can now easily do the same?