Ethan Kaplan

Current

• VP of Technology at Warner Bros. Records
• Owner at BlackRimGlasses.com (Self-employed)
• Owner at Murmurs.com (Sole Proprietorship)

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Past

• Teaching Associate at University of California, Santa Barbara
• Manager of Online Community Development at Freedom Communications
• Webmaster at The Orange County Register

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Education

• University of California, Santa Barbara
• University of California, San Diego

Recommended

2 people have recommended Ethan

Connections

252 connections

Industry

Music

Websites

• My Company
• My Blog

Ethan Kaplan’s Summary

I'm a former academic, a former newspaper webmaster and a present day technological evangelist and innovator. For the past 15 years, I've been operating at the forefront of old media's emergences into the new, including the print, broadcast, academic/art and now music businesses.

I am a geek in every sense. Music, media, technology. I enjoy being labeled as such.

My specialty in business seems to be orchestrating radical transitions of business models, technology, engineering, staffing, infrastructure and business development.

Ethan Kaplan’s Specialties:

New technology acquisition and integration, system designs and architectures, project management, media/cultural theory.

I'm fluent in most programming languages, familiar with all systems (Unix, etc) and if I don't know a piece of technology, can learn it quickly. I know computers from code to hardware and back, including network topology, data-center design, multi-tier web architectures, etc.

Ethan Kaplan’s Experience

• VP of Technology

  Warner Bros. Records

  (Public Company; 201-500 employees; Music industry)

  June 2005 — Present (4 years 2 months)

  I run the technology division of the company, which is entirely focused on the external facing aspect of our technological innovation. This means anything on the web, consumer electronics, digital services, research and development into emerging platforms and just over-all geekiness. We are one of the few strict technology divisions in the music business.
  
  I am basically a startup-type CTO in a music company.
  
  In my time here I have redeveloped the entire web infrastructure including creating an open-source Platform on which we launch Direct to Consumer (D2C) websites. We have 90 sites on the platform currently serving over 1 million unique visitors a week.
  
  I also have a key role in business development, technology partnerships and acquisitions.

• Owner

  BlackRimGlasses.com (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; Myself Only; Internet industry)

  April 2005 — Present (4 years 4 months)

  This is my blog. It is decently popular. To my knowledge, I'm one of the only bloggers from a major record label.

• Owner

  Murmurs.com (Sole Proprietorship)

  (Sole Proprietorship; Myself Only; Music industry)

  April 1996 — Present (13 years 4 months)

  I have run Murmurs.com, the world's largest site for the band R.E.M. in a collaboration with the band since I was 16 years old.

• Teaching Associate

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  (Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Fine Art industry)

  September 2002 — June 2005 (2 years 10 months)

  I was a teaching associate in the art department at UCSB, teaching classes on digital art, conceptual theory, punk music history, post-structuralism/modernism and tactical media.

• Manager of Online Community Development

  Freedom Communications

  (Newspapers industry)

  1999 — 2001 (2 years)

  I worked in various areas during the dot-com era, mostly doing technology development and online community development.
  
  During this time I was a partner with the in-house venture-capital firm, doing due-diligence on early-stage startups as well as helping bootstrap their technology implementations.

• Webmaster

  The Orange County Register

  (Privately Held; 5001-10,000 employees; Newspapers industry)

  June 1995 — September 1997 (2 years 4 months)

  At 16 I was the first webmaster at a major newspaper, helping the OCR launch the small website for the Pulitzer Prize winning expose on the UCI fertility fraud scandal, and later integration of the rest of the paper on to the web.
  
  This included classified systems, pagination to database conversions and dynamic web publishing.

Ethan Kaplan’s Education

• University of California, Santa Barbara

  MFA , Digital Art , 2002 — 2005

  My specialty in the art department was applying conceptual art, art theory and media theory to the realm of digital art and computers in general. That included sociology, linguistics, spacial theory and even higher-dimensional math.

  Activities and Societies:

  Teaching Associate in Digital Art and Critical Theory

• University of California, San Diego

  BA , Visual Art , September 1997 — June 2001

Additional Information

Ethan Kaplan’s Websites:

• My Company
• My Blog

Ethan Kaplan’s Interests:

Music, movies, popular culture, technology, gadgets, microcode and esoteric theory.

Ethan Kaplan’s Honors:

NSF grant while in school.

Ethan Kaplan’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch