Blog

by board member Dave Allen
The digital era in music hasn’t been the friendliest one for artists. There was so much promise but what was supposed to be free and open has quickly become another avenue controlled by various middlemen and gatekeepers looking for their percentage or to build another business on the backs of creators without proper or fair compensation. What CASH is ultimately trying to do is give musicians support in an environment that often feels alienating and hostile.

We want to help them navigate the Internet, build their own online communities how they see fit, and give them the tools they’ll need to make their road a little easier.

The text above is from the CASH Music website about page. I’m pleased and honored to say that in September I was voted to the board of CASH Music, and I will be working hard to help this non-profit, open source organization make a difference for musicians across the globe.

Some of the musicians and record labels using the service already, include Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman, Iron & Wine, Portugal. The Man, Domino Records, Wild Flag,FatCat Records, Kill Rock Stars, Saddle Creek and many more.

You can see some demos here.

Here’s the CASH Music mission statement:

CASH Music is a nonprofit organization that builds open source digital tools for musicians and labels. Our mission is to help educate and empower artists and their fans to foster a more viable and sustainable future for music. What WordPress did for bloggers, we’re doing for musicians. We’re building a free and open platform that’s available to all artists, designed in partnership with the artists and labels who are members of our organization.

The online music “business” has long been a minefield for musicians, especially unsigned independent musicians. When the default business plan for streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora and Mog, is to raise investor money, license music from the recording labels and then launch a service that requires advertising in the stream, one has to wonder what’s in it for the musicians who receive a fraction of compensation in royalties from the labels for their labours, or the music fans who have to endure the bombardment of non-contextual advertising or pay to escape it?

Having had a long career as a professional musician I can attest to the lack of fair compensation: in March of this year I received a royalty statement from Warner Music who hold the copyrights to my Gang of Four catalog. The statement was about 82 pages double-sided thick and included this gem – for the period October to December 31st 2010 a song of mine, Natural’s Not In It, was streamed or downloaded just under 7,000 times. I received a check for $17.22, or rather I didn’t because the statement stamped in bold, red ink noted “Do Not Pay under $25.00.” Which is not surprising given this shout out about their service from Spotify “Millions of tracks, any time you like. Just search for it in Spotify, then play it. Just help yourself to whatever you want, whenever you want it.” Or from MOG “MOG is millions of songs, albums, and radio stations, all on demand.”

“Help yourself to whatever you want.” Fun times.

The genie is out of bottle. The record labels have been licensing their music catalogs as a way to generate past lost revenue; of course this is a wrong-headed idea that I describe as ‘cashing out in the present to solve the problems of the past.’ The problem of course was the decline in physical sales. Instead of focusing on the problem and doing something concrete about it, the labels fell for the idea that online music sales and streaming services would fill the gap and all would be well. Unfortunately that didn’t work and if we are honest it will never work. A whole generation or two of music fans no longer want to own their music, they simply want access to it. For those that do want to own music, Apple is the largest online retailer of music and with iCloud they now provide a tool for easy synchronization of music catalogs and downloads via the iTunes store. Apple’s iTunes didn’t save the recorded music industry, Apple simply took advantage of the vacuum that existed due to the label executive’s lack of intellectual thinking and long-term solutions. A quick fix always gets you high.

As I see it the biggest issue with streaming services is a two-fold road to ruin: streaming music services create a passive experience where music is relegated to being a backdrop to your daily activities (think Pandora, switched on in the a.m. at work. As music drifts by all day you’ll be hard pressed to recall what artists you’ve heard. And you’ll most likely miss the advertising too which I suppose is one blessing of passive engagement with streaming music.) Secondly, giving people cheap, if not free, access to all the music available out there commoditizes music. Music’s dollar value hits the lower bound: Zero.

In the spirit of getting beyond the culture of complaint I am intrigued about all the potential benefits that CASH Music brings to the table. All it takes is for musicians to have a small amount of inquisitiveness and curiosity to get behind the project for it to have legs and become a self-sustaining business model for those that embrace the benefits of the social web, while the CASH Music open source development team continues to push for improvements under the hood.

For musicians the key is simplicity of implementation. For music fans it’s the ability to support their favorite artists by dealing with them directly, without the middlemen.

I’ve discussed the issues of musicians, online music and the social web so many times here that I’ve lost count: I’ve included links to the relevant articles below. Perhaps this Venn diagram can give you an overview, a simple visual, of what CASH Music offers and would like to achieve for musicians and music fans alike. I for one am looking forward to it.

This week’s demo release shows off how we’re approaching social media. I think this is more interesting than people realize — a lot of artists are posting writing, audio, and video all over the Internet then setting up blogs they’re not quite sure what to do with. Now I love a good blog, but I also think we can do a better job of showing off all the social posts from other sites and creating a hub for them on the artist’s site.

A simple widget is fine, but limiting. So we set up an interface where you can pull in you feeds from various sites, style them with CSS, combine them with other feeds, and filter them to show specific content. We’ll set up more straightforward demos, but to show off the power of the idea we did something a little unconventional.

We asked Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman if we could build a demo around their @replies on Twitter, and they graciously said “sure.” The result is a collection of conversation fractures, pieces of exchanges, and a disjointed look at two people leaving little notes for one another on a digital refrigerator. To build it all we did was set up a social feed element, add their twitter feeds, and filter them for tweets starting with a mention of one another. (We started with a filter for all mentions of the other person, but there was something nicer about it only showing direct replies…)

It was as simple as:

The rest is simple HTML/CSS styling. Three minutes of work defining and embedding the element, 18 lines of HTML, and maybe a dozen relevant styles. No custom PHP or JavaScript needed.

We’ll do more demos showing “regular” Twitter feeds, Twitter and Tumblr coexisting in a single feed, and pulling in media from YouTube and the like. But this seems to show the idea we’re reaching for with this better than any other.

My sincere thanks to Amanda and Neil for letting us do this one.