News and opinions from the folks at CASH Music

Later in the week we’ll be doing another code release, this time for Flower — the UI code for the MP3 players and YouTube fanciness in this post. But more on that later. I mention it because it was while writing the blog post for Flower that I realized something:

I love writing about music.

So expect these music posts to become more of a regular thing. Same goes for blog posts in general, but for now here’s some music to put in your ears:

The Corin Tucker Band
It’s not just Spin raving about The Corin Tucker Band’s debut, 1000 Years. I’m in love with this record. From the first track on it’s got an amazing sense of itself, with a unique presence all wrapped up nicely in rock and roll. The October release can’t come soon enough. (If you can’t wait then check out their labelmates, Grass Widow who are also getting a lot of love these days.) For now, here’s “Doubt,” the first single off 1000 Years:

She Makes War
She Makes War is a solo project from Laura Kidd. I could point out that she’s a gifted musician, especially on bass. Or that she has a knack for writing a great pop song that’s a bit more than it seems. Or even that her voice mixes with the bass-heavy tracks in a great and unique way. But none of that would do any justice to what she’s doing — Laura has built a complete aesthetic around She Makes War and has created a world ready to draw you in. So go jump on the preorder as soon as you’re done watching the video for “I Am.”
 

Buke & Gass
Their debut Riposte is due out on Brassland in a few weeks and you can learn more about Buke & Gass in a great Stereogum feature. The sound will instantly catch your ear; interestingly woven phrases played on custom instruments made by the band lead to something unexpected in a really amazing way. Have a listen to “Medulla Oblongata” below:

Magnetic Island
Magnetic Island (formerly RENMINBI) will be putting out a new EP called “Out at Sea” on September 21. From the previews on their Bandcamp page and up on SoundCloud it’ll be an interesting new direction. I really can’t wait to see where they take it — such a fiercely independent voice being redirected is an exciting prospect.

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Plenty of people see the high-profile work we do with artists like Kristin Hersh and Calexico, but there are a lot of others we’ve worked with a little further from the public eye who deserve some attention — say what you will about the music industry, there’s some amazing music being made right now! Here’s the best new stuff from other artists we’ve worked with, friends, and family.

The Thermals have a new album out in August. It’s amazing. I love a Kill Rock Stars release. The sun still sets in the west. Nothing left to say except: preorder.

The Thermals – I Don’t Believe You by killrockstars

The amazing Anna Bond over at FatCat introduced me to Silje Nes — beautiful Norwegian etherial music. She’s got a new record coming out on FatCat soon, and she’s been playing out with another favorite, DM Stith. You can see listen in to a couple shows courtesy of the CBC: Silje Nes, DM Stith.

Zoë Keating has self-released a wonderful album called “Into The Trees.” You can stream it and buy it here. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, you’re really missing out. Zoë is an exceptionally talented cellist who somehow manages to visualize every piece of a song at once, building and looping her music using Ableton live. All sound blend into a elegant simplicity that hides just how complex it is to make.

LA’s own Superhumanoids released “Urgency,” a great 6-song EP showing off their unique sound; picture pop re-imagined by David Lynch, but less creepy. It’s fully retro and modern at the same time, with a red vinyl EP that’s worth collecting even if you don’t have a turntable. You can hear and download it here. They’ve also done a remix of Meanest Man Contest‘s ‘Takitani Edit’ — potentially too much awesome for one track.

Meanest Man Contest – Takitani Edit (Superhumanoids Remix) by superhumanoids

Old friends Learning Music aren’t slowing down a bit, with something like 482 albums since last winter. That estimate may be a little high, but not by much. John Wood and his prolific band of collaborators were featured on NPR’s All Songs Considered last year and it seems they’ve been picking up steam ever since.

The folks over at Whitesmith are busy these days. Margaret Cho has a new album out featuring comedy collaborations with artists like Andrew Bird, Tegan and Sara, Brendan Benson, and others. You can check that out and preorder it here. Family of the Year is putting out an extended LP, ‘Our Songbook,’ on French label . And Gold Motel (free single download here) has been all over the place, debuting their video on SPIN and getting a great writeup in Nylon. Big things!

There’s not much to say about Howe Gelb that hasn’t been said. From Giant Sand through to his solo and collaborative work he’s shown himself to be an American original and a talent unlike any other. He quietly released “Howe Gelb & A Band of Gypsies: Alegrías” in June and it’s well worth checking out: Amazon.com.

Providence is getting even louder! Even as we prep to move to Portland I’m swelling with hometown pride for Providence, Rhode Island. The Body just grabbed an amazing Pitchfork review, Howl has been getting national attention, Anchorbrain just released a new Six Finger Satellite record, What Cheer? Brigade isn’t to be missed, and Megasus is still awesome. Cianci in ’10!

 

CASH SOFTWARE IN THE WILD
Lastly, we’re just on the verge of another software release, the 1.0 version of our Flower UI tools, so we’ve been looking around to see how people have been working with the social tools we released. It’s great to see Vagrant using the Facebook tool for a Pete Yorn giveaway, and over at New West Records there’s an entire Old 97′s EP up for grabs. If you’ve seen similar things — or if you’re using it yourself — please drop a line in the comments.

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Let me say up front that this post is just me talking. These are my opinions and not an ‘official’ organizational position. I wouldn’t normally rock a disclaimer, but I wanted to be clear since Eric Steuer of Creative Commons sits on our board. We haven’t spoken about this yet, though I feel it’s an important issue.

Last week ASCAP, the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers, sent a fundraising letter out to many of its 380,000 members raising money to fight organizations like Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. Their argument is that these organizations are undermining copyright by pushing that music “should be free” and that the “groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music.”

You can read more about it here, the original letter here, and the Creative Commons response here.

The underlying claims that Creative Commons, the EFF, or Public Knowledge are eroding copyright or trying to set the value for music are simply incorrect. They show a profound misunderstanding of the missions driving these organizations, and worse, an inability to move past old models and help guide the musicians they represent through a time of transition.

Public Knowledge and the EFF are leaders in the field of protecting individual rights and freedoms in an increasingly digital world. I know less specifically about the operations of PK, but the EFF mobilizes brilliant and tireless minds to assist and fight for individuals who use and create new technologies. In court and in critical thinking they champion privacy, free speech, innovation, and broad availability of communications. Their cause is noble and when they have been involved in the music industry their role has been to help individuals wrongly or unfairly prosecuted by groups such as the RIAA in cases involving new technologies like file sharing.

Creative Commons is an often misunderstood organization. They create and promote legal licenses written using the copyright licenses of the US and other countries. Not only are they not undermining copyright, they are using it as the foundation for all their work.

In the simplest terms, a license is an agreement between a rights-holder and a third party specifying how the third party can use a piece of content. This is a vital concept for digital music. If you purchase a piece of music it comes with a license, which you should read and understand, specifying how you can use that file. The license defines if you are allowed to copy it to multiple devices, sell it, place it in your home movies, etc.

A lot of music is shared with no license, meaning your rights are really not defined while the copyrights of the rights holder are still clearly in place. This isn’t a problem when you buy a track from a digital retailer because you’ve probably clicked “I accept” on a marathon terms-of-service page at some point. But your rights become muddied when you download a promotional MP3 from a music blog without a license in place. You’re probably fine, but technically there’s no agreement between you and the rights holder.

Enter Creative Commons licenses. What Creative Commons does is establish a series of licenses specifically built for sharing content. As a rights holder you can specify how you want people to be able to use and share your music. You can allow sharing and re-sharing, ensure that your name is properly attributed, and allow or disallow commercial use. CC licenses provide a publicly available middle ground between public domain and all rights reserved: some rights reserved. The licenses are freely available, easy to use, nonexclusive, and entirely optional. They help artists by providing clarity, giving real options for legal sharing while defending the copyrights they choose to retain.

So with their optional series of licenses Creative Commons is giving artists new ways to share their music as part of specific career strategies. There is nothing about these licenses that prohibits the sale of music, that defines pricing models, or that stops an artist from making money in any way. In fact, there are great examples of Creative Commons actually helping artists increase exposure, gain audience, drive promotions, and make money through direct sales or sync opportunities. (Take a look at a few examples we posted here.)

At best the assertions made by ASCAP show a lack of vision, and at worst are downright misleading.

It’s upsetting to see an organization as influential as ASCAP essentially reacting to change like a rabid dog, biting at anyone near that change. They should be raising funds to explore new options for music monetization and new models for artists. No amount of litigation or lobbying will change the fact that the music and recording industries are changing.

Rather than fight the tide, ASCAP should be looking to work with excellent organizations like the EFF and Creative Commons to ensure a sustainable future for artists. If they are unwilling, I would strongly urge artists to look at their PRO contracts and switch to a more progressive-thinking Performance Rights Organization like BMI or SESAC.

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I’m out in LA at an interesting music conference being put on by Scion. We were invited to present CASH Music to the audience here, and I thought I’d share the talk I gave. (Well, the talk I planned to give. I’m sure I went off course a bit, but here’s what I based my note cards on.)

I’m here to introduce CASH Music. We’re a startup tech foundation, a nonprofit, focused on building open music tech with the goal of artist sustainability. Think about us as a baby Mozilla foundation for music tech.

Instead of building our tools in a vacuum then training people to use them, we’ve been working hand in hand with artists, managers, and indie labels to build real-world projects that work — finding the common points and pushing them towards releasable code.

Over the last two years we’ve worked on over sixty projects for artists like Kristin Hersh, Deerhoof, The Swell Season, The Thermals, Zoe Keating, Brendan Benson, and more. Those projects have ranged from pre-release album streams for the press, to patronage-model subscriptions, simple commerce, and a variety of promotional projects.

With every project we refine code, write and test new functionality, and see what works in a practical environment. With that approach we’ve released a few tools to date:

• There is freely downloadable code to enable downloads in exchange for Twitter and Facebook participation. Two mini apps that allow artists to easily trade in social currency.
• We’ve also released all the JavaScript behind our interface tools— sound players, lightboxes, and the brains to connect them all with complex events all in the browser.
• There’s a lot more on the way, including enhancements to existing releases as well as a few additional standalone apps that will be released before our larger open-source platform is ready.

I’d also like to talk generally about the importance of open tech, and why we see our own mission as vital.

When we talk about tech we’re talking about open-source code — and for a reason. A core belief of CASH Music is that open code has revolutionized industry and that the future of music tech is open. The Internet couldn’t exist without open technologies and open protocols. And think about what WordPress has done for bloggers: an industry that didn’t exist fifteen years ago has grown to change our very idea of what ‘news’ is and how it can be reported.

We see the same potential impact for cooperative and open technologies in the music industry.

The term “music industry” is important. We all use it as a synonym for the recording industry but they’re really quite different things. The central model in the recording industry revolves around control of manufacture and distribution of a physical product — over the years that’s been vinyl, magnetic tape, compact disc, and a whole bunch of cute formats that never really made it. So the idea was that those objects could be sold, primarily through stores, as the major revenue stream — then merchandizing and the rest would follow suit.

Physical recordings have an important role in the future, but they shouldn’t be the center of things. The music industry —the real music industry — is simply that: musicians being industrious, making art, playing music, and finding the right models to support themselves, tailored to their audience. It’s multiple models, per-release solutions, and fan-driven.

So we’re in the middle of a significant moment of change.

The idea of open technology in music is critical right now. During times of change and great innovation power and control shift. None of us want to see an industry that’s only relevant in Apple’s ecosystem or some even uglier Fox Myspace future.

By working together on open-source technologies for music we can ensure that artists remain the center of this new music industry, meaning they’ll have opportunities and there’s a chance real music won’t disappear behind the manufactured shit that sits atop the charts these days. Sustainability for musicians means sustainability for an industry built around music.

Open technologies mean that a new model made by one artist can benefit the entire music community. Open tech means startups can focus on innovation and service instead of being forced to build the same core technologies as everyone else. To really boil it down: open technology will move music into the future and benefit all stakeholders in a new music industry.

We don’t see CASH Music as some kind of magic solution, just part of one. As a nonprofit tech foundation we’re essentially neutral, responsible to our mission instead of our investors. We’re guided by a smart board with representation from artists, labels, and other organizations. They help set our direction but we can’t do it alone. So my real purpose here is to ask for help.

As with any nonprofit money is hard to come by so I’d ask you to consider visiting cashmusic.org and making a donation.

But even more importantly we’re looking for allies in this fight. If you code, consider giving time. If your company has code it can open up then share it. Don’t just sit by and let the future of the music industry be determined by others — get involved and make sure that the future of music is open.

That’s really all I have to say. You can learn more about our organization at cashmusic.org, and hopefully we’ll hear from you soon. Thanks for listening.

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Quite a few people have downloaded the Facebook and Twitter mini-apps we posted last week. More than we expected, really. The code can easily be experimented with, but to make things easier here are details for setting up Facebook and Twitter applications to be compatible with the code. The app types are about as basic as they come, so the text below is the gist-of-it version; accompanied by step-by-step guides, including screenshots. (Click to enlarge.)

Hope it helps!

Twitter
To add a new Twitter app you need to head over to Twitter and find the ‘Register an Application’ page by clicking Settings > Connections >Developer’s settings link > Register a new application. Be sure to give your new app read and write permissions, and set the callback URL to the location where you’re hosting your tweet-for-track page.

Finding your Twitter ID is a little tricky. Click ‘Profile’ in the top navigation to go to your own Twitter profile. Look in the sidebar for the RSS link and check out the URL. That URL will end with a number followed by ‘.rss’ — the number is your Twitter ID.

Facebook
Adding a Facebook app is easy if you know where to start. Head over to http://www.facebook.com/developers/ and click the ‘Set Up New Application’ button to start. Give it a name and agree to TOS and you’ll see your API key and secret. Be sure to set connection settings to include your domain as the application’s base domain and you’re all set up.

To grab your page’s ID number just click on its profile picture and look in your browser’s address bar. The URL will end with id=xxx. That id= number is your page ID.

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It was release day for three new albums we were lucky enough to help out with — and there’s been a lot in the last few weeks we should have written about so it seemed like a great time for a recap.

Today: Family of the Year, Frightened Rabbit, and Zola Jesus
Family of the Year is back with a new EP, Through The Trees, available directly from the band on their website as a digital download for just $4. It’s another great collection of songs adding to the wall of amazing music at familyoftheyear.net. Our involvement with Frightened Rabbit and Zola Jesus was limited to pre-release, but getting an early listen to these two striking records was a treat. Frightened Rabbit‘s The Winter Of Mixed Drinks has an epic but approachable sound, and a nice lyrical thread running throughout. The Zola Jesus EP, Stridulum, is beautiful and haunting; synth laced with opera and echoing emotion. You can buy the Frightened Rabbit album here, and the Zola Jesus EP here.

On Tour: Xiu Xiu and Quasi
Two weeks ago Kill Rock Stars released new records for Xiu Xiu and Quasi, and now both bands are touring in support. Xiu Xiu’s Dear God, I Hate Myself is an avant/gothic/pop masterpiece, and Quasi’s American Gong another great offering from one of the best rock bands to come out of the Pacific Northwest. You can get tourdates here, and it should be noted that at each show of their tour Xiu Xiu will be fundraising for At The Crossroads, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps street youth through counseling, outreach, and other services.

Throwing Muses, Learning Music, Magnetic Island, and Portugal. The Man, The Franks
And we’ve tweeted, posted, and shouted about all of these already, but it’s worth a few quick reminders:

• Kristin Hersh has begun posting demos that will ultimately be the seeds of a new Throwing Muses record. You’ll be able to see the whole thing as a work-in-progress on the Throwing Muses CASH page.
• Learning Music recently relaunched their website and the depth is staggering. Have 9 hours to kill? Check out some of the amazing music over at learningmusicmonthly.com.
• RENMINBI has changed their name to Magnetic Island and released a cover track to celebrate. Their version of Lou Reed and John Cale’s “A Dream” is up at magneticisland.cashmusic.org.
• CASH didn’t have anything to do with this one, but friends Portugal. The Man released a great new record called American Ghetto. You can get it here.
• Another amazing friends-and-family release: The Duh EP by The Franks. So good! Full preview and purchase options at diefranksdie.com

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About a year and a half ago, I started a management company. As I spent my workdays zipping files of content around from artists to their team members and/or promotional outlets via IM, Yousendit, e-mail or whatever made the most sense for the recipient, I wondered (and had wondered for years) why it wasn’t as easy to sell/distribute music through my artists’ websites.

In fact, I would often yell about this into the universe, and conveniently lived on the 26th floor with a gorgeous view, so it really did feel like someone out there would hear me as I vented to friends and colleagues.

Then one day, just like magic/Oprah and The Secret, an email from Jesse von Doom hit my inbox opening with: “I run CASH Music, a nonprofit dedicated to new music models and new ways for artists to connect to fans.”  After some major geek bonding, Jesse invited me to be a part of CASH’s board, which included a-mazing folks along the lines of Kristin Hersh and Maggie Vail.  I was and am truly honored to be included in this organization along with the artists and industry folk that have been assembled.

But what does this MEAN?  For artists, me, and you?

ARTISTS
CASH has built custom direct-to-fan platforms for select artists as a test run. Thus, peeps like Deerhoof can post sheet music, encouraging fans to create/upload their own versions and 50FootWave has the ability to distribute torrents of their EP’s worldwide.  This is in addition to super rad pre-release support for Dandy Warhols, Elliott Smith (KRS rereleases), Fischerspooner, Lushlife, Marnie Stern, Secret Machines, Thao, The Thermals, The Vines and more.  You can view additional test artists and their content release formats HERE.

ME (slash Whitesmith Entertainment and our lovely artists).
CASH created a promo page for Sydney Wayser lush with audio downloads, video, press materials, and artwork for shows that has been a massive tool in all areas of her quickly growing career from booking to landing syncs to connecting with international partners.

Jesse then worked some magic for Family of the Year, creating a page for their debut album launch that is my dream of a sleek, functional, user-friendly, data-catching machine.  The page has generated more income for the band than major digital retailers (iTunes, Amazon).  Not that we don’t love those outlets, but am just reporting the facts for this particular artist.

CASH even built the downloadable media function on my company’s website (design by Jesse).

There are other amazing things CASH does, and I assure you, the wizards behind this thing have nothing but positive and genuine intentions.  I am reinvigorated and re-inspired every time I get off the phone with Jesse. These are bonus points, but certainly worth nothing, because we are dealing with art and music at the end of the day and it’s always good to remind ourselves why we’re all here.

YOU
I am one seriously lucky girl, I fully admit that.  In addition to Jesse, I am surrounded by a virtual and literal community (Brooklyn!) that is constantly experimenting with art and technology.  I’m happy to be the lab rat/conduit between these ideas and the artists I proudly manage.  But guess what!  The trials are on people like me so CASH can tweak things just right before making their tools open source in the coming months for everyone.  Even aliens!  Though they have probably sorted out beaming holograms of concerts into their personal pods or spaceships at this point, but it’s a nice gesture.

Questions?  E-mail me.  We’re open-source kinda people.

Much Love,

Emily White

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