Music and Conversation with the Legendary Sound Engineer & DJ to Jay-Z.
For the third installment of his Sound & Vision series at 92YTribeca, legendary sound engineer and DJ Young Guru is looking ahead. How is technology changing entertainment and the entertainment industry of tomorrow? What impact will advancements in data sharing and global connectivity have on fans and artists? Guru’s guests - including social media thought leader Dr. Sinan Aral, BitTorrent’s Executive Director of Marketing Matt Mason and Maxell’s Director of Technology and New Product Planning, Rich D’Ambrise - offer expertise and insights on the technologies that are shaping our vision of the future..
Sound & Vision is a three-part series mixing discussion and music curated by Young Guru, legendary sound engineer and DJ who has mixed 10 of Jay-Z’s 11 albums and shaped some of the biggest talent in hip-hop. For each event, Young Guru invites a different special guest to join him onstage and talk about music industry trends, hot topics, and the creative process behind some of pop music’s biggest hits.
Brief Bios
Sinan Aral is an Assistant Professor and Microsoft Faculty Fellow at the NYU Stern School of Business. His research focuses on social contagion and measuring and managing how information diffusion in massive social networks such as Twitter and Facebook affects information worker productivity, consumer demand and viral marketing. This research has earned Aral speaking engagements at TEDxSiliconValley and the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) and has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science and Public Leaders Fellowship, an NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the Best Overall Paper Award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) (in both 2006 and 2008) and the IBM Faculty Award. Professor Aral’s work on Randomized Trials of Peer Influence in Networks, published in Management Science, was one of the first randomized trials of peer influence in social media networks of millions of users and was selected as an “Editor’s Choice” article by the editors of Science. He currently serves on the board of SocialAmp, a social commerce startup that enables targeting and peer referral in social media networks, and is an organizer of the Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN).
A leading expert in disruptive innovation, copyright infringement and the promise of P2P technologies, Matt Mason currently serves as Executive Director of Marketing at BitTorrent and is a board member at PopTech. Mason is also the bestselling author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, the first book ever to hit the number one spot on Amazon’s Economics/Free Enterprise bestseller list and the Rap bestseller list at the same time. Mason began his career as a pirate radio and club DJ in London, going on to become founding editor-in-chief of the seminal music magazine RWD. In 2004, he was selected as one of the faces of Gordon Brown’s Start Talking Ideas campaign and was presented the Prince’s Trust London Business of the Year Award by HRH Prince Charles. Mason has written and produced TV series, screenplays, comic strips, apps and records, not to mention award-winning, global advertising campaigns. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer Music Monthly, Dazed & Confused, Adweek, VICE, Complex, Liberation and other publications in more than 20 countries. His short story Hard Times was published by Penguin as part of the We Tell Stories project, which won Best in Show at SXSW and was shown in the Talk To Me exhibition at the MOMA in New York City in 2011.
Rich D’Ambrise is Director of Technology and New Product Planning at Maxell Corporation of America; a leading full-line manufacturer of digital and analog media products for computer storage, professional audio and video, consumer audio and video, batteries and accessories. With 30 plus years experience with magnetic, optical, holographic and solid state media, D’Ambrise has authored numerous articles on magnetic recording, optical storage, and solid state media appearing in trade publications such as Computer Technology Review and Imaging Magazine. Prior to joining Maxell, D’Ambrise spent 12 years as a technical consultant with both WANG Laboratories and ITT. At Maxell, he is responsible for the company’s ground-floor development and introduction of new technologies and new product direction. His duties also include researching, growing and nurturing technology partnerships that align Maxell with groundbreaking companies that are changing the face of the CE industry. He has also participated in several international and domestic standards committees such as the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), DVD-RAM Promotion Group (RAMPRG), Recordable DVD Council (RDVDC), Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), DVD Forum, and has been a member of American National Standards Institute (ANSI), Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA), Professional Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA).