Guy McCreery

Guy McCreery is a Dr of Anthropology and formerly an organisational change consultant. He founded Third Ear in 2000, intending it to be a ground-breaking music and entertainment portal, focusing on digital arts and the distribution opportunities presented by technologies that elided the means of artistic creativity and the means of distribution. His timing was atrocious. The bursting of the 'dot com bubble' happened the same week that Third Ear launched a private investment offer.

In order to keep the goal alive, Third Ear quickly mutated into a more traditional distribution business and recording label, drawing on the strengths of the founders, licensing and importing electronic and dance music into Japan. Third Ear has also specialised in remix coordination and special projects for Japanese major labels, film soundtrack coordination, and cutting-edge digital arts events, such as SonarSound Tokyo.

Five years later, in 2005, Third Ear launched Digital Music Delivery (DMD), a programmer and aggregator of music for the Japanese market over mobile networks, focusing on niche programming. DMD will launch in the UK in 2006.

The ethos of Third Ear has always been to popularise and make profitable genuine creative endeavour, past and present. Our goal is to pursue and encourage technologies that can make this possible.

Synopsis

Guy McCreery will be talking about integrating new media technologies and associated business models into existing media technologies and business models and plans. New media technologies have to be integrated into existing technologies without destabilising revenue streams or threatening the business they are intended to improve and enlighten. This is never easy and never without problems. Managing multiple media platforms and technologies costs money and introduces risk into a business. The design and promotion of new technologies (rarely endeavours undertaken by organisations with the same goals) has to take these realities into account if new technologies are going to be adopted smoothly and successfully, by businesses and ultimately by consumers.