SALUTE DAVID KUSEK

All electronic musicians owe praise to David Kusek, not only is he responsible for creating the electronic drum machine, his company at the time, Passport Design contributed to the birth of MIDI ( Musical Instrument Digital Interface).

The video above is Kusek's presentation from the Business Innovation Factory Summit. He addresses multiple topics which we discuss regularly here at Affinity Blog.

He supports the creation of a music utility to “monetize” the immense wave of file-sharing that has become standard operating procedure in the industry. He reasons that Internet users already pay for access to a network that supplies the music, so why not add a nominal fee to the ISP bill and allow for legal trading? With approximately 80 million households using the Internet, a monthly music utility fee of $3 would generate almost $3 billion in annual music sales from households alone.

“If you tracked what was downloaded,” Kusek says, “you could create a system where the money flows exactly to the people who are listening. It could be a 30 to 40 billion dollar business again, as it was in the nineties.”

Amen.