Prof. Sandy Pearlman

Schulich Distinguished Chair, McGill University, Montreal

Schulich Distinguished Chair, McGill University. Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the History of Ideas. New School Fellow in Sociology and Anthropology. Relentless brainstormer of the ever-tightening embrace of Music by Technology and Technology by Music.

Producer, creator, songwriter, manager and theorist for many of the most important bands and musical trends of the last 25 years: Blue Oyster Cult, Clash, Black Sabbath, Dictators, Pavlov's Dog, Dream Syndicate.

Described by the Billboard Producer's Directory as "the Hunter Thompson of rock, a gonzo producer of searing intellect and vast vision." Gonzo enough to be played by Christopher Walken in Saturday Night Live's infamous skit on the making of "The Reaper" (which Pearlman produced for Blue Oyster Cult).

One of the first of the teen age Rock Critic cabal (see "Almost Famous"), he paid his way through school in the early 70s with his writing, actually inventing the use of the term "Heavy Metal" for that music, during his sojourn as an editor and writer at Crawdaddy magazine.

Consultant to, and scourging critic of, overweight multinational entertainment conglomerates, stressing out on declining market share and growing irrelevancy.

President and Owner of the seminal American alternative label, 415 Records. A founder of EMusic.com (the first of the downloading companies, way back in 1998). A principal of Moodlogic (creator of omniscient trans-media navigation and recommendation engines for the likes of Sony and Microsoft).

Framer of many of the key terms of the current public discourse concerning "the Future of Music." Visiting Lecturer on these issues at such academic venues as Stanford, Stony Brook, the University of Calgary, McGill and assorted Universities of California (Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Monterey...).

His (now famous or notorious) proposal for the "5 Cents Solution" to the total re-architecting of the music business, rolled out last year at Canadian Music Week in Toronto, under the auspices of McGill University, has been rampant in print, radio, TV and the Internet, since first appearing in an interview he did with the Toronto Globe and Mail, immediately producing in reaction over 450 interviews, articles and blog pieces in just the first week following.