
Bill Rosenblatt is an expert on technology, data, and intellectual property issues in music. He is president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, the strategy consulting firm that he founded in 2000. Bill's music industry clients have included major digital music services (Spotify, Pandora), major record labels (Warner Music Group, Sony Music), and technology companies ranging from startups to Google, HP, and British Telecom. He has consulted to public policy entities on issues related to copyright in the digital age in the US, Europe, and Asia; and he has served as an expert witness in copyright and patent litigations involving technology related to digital media and copyright, including royalty rate-setting proceedings for digital music services.
Prior to founding GiantSteps, Bill's background includes stints as CTO of an Internet education startup at Columbia University, CIO of a division of McGraw-Hill, and marketing and consulting positions at Sun Microsystems. He began his career as a software engineer in data communications at Motorola.
Bill is program chair and co-producer (with the Copyright Society) of the annual Copyright and Technology Conferences. He has spoken at conferences around the world including the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He is co-author, with Howie Singer, of the book Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is also a media and entertainment contributor to Forbes and the author of a book on digital rights management.
Bill has a BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, an MS in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts, and continuing education in business and finance from NYU. He serves on the trustee boards of the Copyright Society and Princeton Broadcasting Service, Inc., and on the peer review board of the Journal of the Copyright Society. He plays guitar in the Copyright Society house band Crude Humble & Obvious.
Bill has been an Adjunct Faculty member in the Music Business program since 2019; he teaches the courses Data Analysis in the Music Industry and Technological Transformation of the Music Industry.
Selected Publications
- 4 Out Of 5 Songs Sent To Music Services Are Never Played; What This Means For The Industry. Forbes.com, March 6, 2025.
- The Media Industry’s Race To License Content For AI. Forbes.com, July 18, 2024.
- The Global Digital Music Landscape: An Overview of Distribution, Copyright, and Rights Administration for Music in the Digital Age. WIPO Committee on Intellectual Property and Development, April 2024.
- Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (with Howie Singer), Oxford University Press, September 2023.
- Review of Identifier and Metadata Standards in the Publishing Industry. Publishing Research Quarterly, 38, 396–404 (2022).
- Pearson's Digital-First Strategy Will Change How Students Get Textbooks. Forbes.com, July 20, 2019.
- The Future of Blockchain Technology in the Music Industry, January 2020. Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, Vol. 66, No. 2, Spring 2019.
- UltraViolet, Hollywood's Attempt To Control The Digital Video Supply Chain, Will Shut Down. Forbes.com, February 3, 2019.
- Vinyl Is Bigger Than We Thought. Much Bigger. Forbes.com, September 18, 2018.
- The Short, Unhappy Life Of Music Downloads. Forbes.com, May 7, 2018.
- The Big Push To Reform Music Copyright For The Digital Age. Forbes.com, February 25, 2018.
- Why Amazon Doesn't Give You An E-Book With Your Print Book Purchase. Forbes.com, February 8, 2017.
- How Long Can the Beatles Remain Digital Holdouts? The Curious Case of the Fake Beatles Cover. Forbes.com, October 31, 2015.
- Digital Rights and Digital Television. Chapter 14 of Television Goes Digital. New York: Springer, 2009.
- DRM, law and technology: an American perspective. In Papers from the First European Workshop on Technological & Security Issues in Digital Rights Management (EuDiRights '06). Published as Online Information Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2007, 73-84.
- A Short Policy Analysis of Copyright Law and DRM in the United States. Technikfolgenabschätzung: Theorie und Praxis, Vol. 15, No. 2, August 2006, 19-26.
- Peer-to-Peer Networking and Digital Rights Management: How Market Tools Can Solve Copyright Problems (with Michael Einhorn). Policy Analysis #534, The Cato Institute, February 17, 2005. Also published in: Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, Vol. 52, No. 2, Winter 2005, 239-271.
- Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology. John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
- Do-it-yourself broadband stereo. Salon, October 30, 2000
- The Digital Object Identifier: Solving the Dilemma of Copyright Protection Online. In Journal of Electronic Publishing, University of Michigan Press, December 1997.
- Digital media management: technology infrastructure for electronic publishing. In Electronic Publishing Strategies, pp. 255-80. Leatherhead, Surrey, England: Pira International, October 1997.