Lucas Gonze is an innovator in the social media space. He was the founder of the first web-based music playlist Webjay, which became the model for modern music sharing sites like Last.fm and iLike. Webjay was subsequently bought by Yahoo in 2006 and then sadly discontinued. Perhaps it was ahead of its time.
During his time at Yahoo, Lucas was the Director of Product Management in their music division, where he created the awesome Yahoo! Media Player and led the lineup of streaming media players, including Launchcast.
More recently, Lucas led the creation of XSPF ("spiff"), the non-proprietary internet playlist format, and he helped create the method for embedding Creative Commons license statements in various digital formats (e.g. MP3, OGG, etc). Lucas is a champion of Creative Commons and was one of the creators of the CC Mixter remix community.
In a lot of ways, Lucas started the social music revolution and continues to refine it and make it more accessible by developing open formats like XSPF. Be sure to check out our extended interview with him embedded at the top!
gurdonark said:
This was a great interview. Thank you for conducting and sharing it.
The fact that public domain music (pre-1923 in the US)
is a "safe" source for the remixer and song-player
gives us an interesting analog challenge to bring about a digital music. Just as Lucas has done with his own site, soupgreens.com, it's a good time to seek out those 19th Century public domain sheet music sources. Lucas plays them in an analog cool-guitar way, which is wonderful--but
perhaps the future is in taking analog pre-recording-era songs, and bringing them as the DNA of a digital music revolution of "podcast-safe" new material. Jurassic Park indeed, but, thankfully, no Jeff Goldblum.
The music sharing culture is still a toddler. I cannot wait until it begins to really run.
