Dear Readers - This just in! We are very pleased to announce that Craigslist's Founder Craig Newmark will be featured in a luncheon keynote interview at our Digital Media Conference West next week in San Francisco. Craig joins a stellar line-up of speakers from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, including fellow Bay Area whiz, Digg CEO and Co-Founder Jay Adelson.

Los Angeles - We are very fortunate to have over 300 of the most influential decision-makers in the music industry gathered in Los Angeles this week for our 2-day deal-makers forum Digital Music Forum West to network, do deals, and share ideas about the business. It kicked off yesterday with, among other things, a discussion on the intersection of Urban Music, technology and digital lifestyles with Garth Trinidad, Award-Winning DJ & Host for KCRW (pictured).

Thank you to the 250+ participants at Future of Television West this week! We’ve received a lot of great feedback about the event and know that each and every one of you contributed to making it such a wonderful event.

We would like to extend a special thanks to all of our sponsors: Entertainment Technology Center @ USC, Macrovision, Move Networks, Davis Wright Tremaine, CEA, Parks Associates, Webcastr, Frank Magid Associates, CTM, Visual Effects Society, Producers Guild of America, Terpin Communications, NVPR, Social Radius, Mobile Monday, Mobile Excellence Awards, Web Television Week, Tubefilter, Billboard Publicity Wire, UCLA Anderson, EMF, and New York – Tokyo.

New York - For the past year, Jim Griffin has advised Warner Music Group on digital distribution and licensing models with the goal of bringing an end to the litigation that has put a wedge between the major labels and their customers and replacing it with a regular flow of income for right holders. The project known as Choruss, which is being incubated at Warner and is planned to be rolled out as a non-profit with Griffin at the helm, proposes to build a small music-royalty fee into university tuition payments received from students, and, if successful, could be expanded to make ISPs the collector of the fees. For those of you who were not able to attend DMW's Digital Music Forum East this past week, here is a complete transcript of his interesting keynote presentation:

The South By Southwest (SxSW) conferences and festival begin March 13 in Austin, Texas, and will go on until March 22. DMW is happy to once again bring you the hottest list of buzz bands, courtesy of music publicist Fiona Bloom (after the break). If you can't attend, make sure to check out some of these bands and other news from SxSW on the official SxSW YouTube channel. Enjoy!

New York - Fascinating keynote at the Digital Music Forum East this morning from Jim Griffin, an advisor to Warner Music Group and head of the Choruss initiative. I'm getting a text of his speech and will post. But suffice to say he delivered a smackdown to Rick Carnes and Chris Castle over their criticisms of Choruss which ran in op-ed that appeared in Content Agenda and other publications.

Well that was a downer from Disney yesterday in its fiscal Q1 earnings call. The DVD business is tanking, nothing else is taking up the slack and we have to spend less money making movies. The "conversion rate" for new releases (i.e. the ratio of DVDs sold per million dollars of box-office gross) is falling, consumers are buying fewer catalog titles, shelf-space is disappearing and prices are plummeting. And oh, yeah: the rest of businesses pretty much suck right now, too. It sure didn't sound like the happiest place on earth.

Last week we provided the BBC with some interesting data illustrating how UK Internet visits to Social Networks and Forums have overtaken Adult websites. As the chart below illustrates, social networks overtook last October and have remained ahead since.