today’s vegetable

Moving city-to-city each year, DIY Days is a rad conference that tries to start real dialog about funding, distribution, and strategy in the arts. Up next is Philly on the first of August, where I’ll be speaking on a panel with Mark Schoneveld (yvynyl), Leah Kaufman (Phrequency), and Brian McTear (Weathervane.) We’re covering new models in music during a 45 minute blitzkrieg of the senses. Or a civil chat. Probably the latter.

Given that it’s such a broad topic, I thought I’d put some thoughts down here, share them with the other speakers, and open up a bit to questions, comments, etc. Mark and I actually kicked around some ideas over IM, so a lot of this post stems from that conversation.

There are two primary topics I think are important to cover:

1. Finishing Strong (or approaching a release holistically)
2. Currency (it’s not just for money anymore)

You hear it all the time: an artist talking about a release in the past tense before its release date. They finished in the studio, they feel great about it, and they can’t wait to see how it’s received. That’s just not enough. You can’t simply wait and see. You’ve got to capture listeners, plan promotion, and set the vision for how your music is released. The whole process should be treated artfully with care and creativity.

It’s not so much about the particular route you take, but rather the execution. Examples? You’ve got Jonathan Coulton building a career giving away CC licensed tracks, Josh Freese doing the ultimate in tiered promotions, the perfect boxed set by NIN, Amanda Palmer twittering a storm, Radiohead, The Breeders hand screening their covers, and Kristin Hersh doing a fan-funded album thanks to her amazing Strange Angel subscribers. (Not to mention Jill Sobule, David Byrne, Fanfarlo’s $1 album, and plenty of great content-for-email promotions.)

Probably too many examples. But what’s amazing in each is the forethought that went into the music and the actual releases. Kristin asked her engineer (the awesome Steve Rizzo) to mix down into remix-friendly stems. Coulton committed to releasing a song a week for a year. NIN documents the entire process and releases a box with photos of the recording, beautiful art shots, and maticulous art direction.

These are full strategies, developed early and delivered well at every turn. Better yet, the artistry is present from the first recording until the package is opened (or downloaded.) That level of care and craftsmanship simply cannot be faked.

All of that just scratches the surface. But strategies are nothing without goals. And those goals have to be far more specific than “we want to sell x copies of y release.” Artists need a specific idea of what they’re trying to do with a release, and a way to measure their success. This is where the idea of alternate currencies come in.

Trying to get noticed? Maybe play counts or social followers are the currency you care about. Need to connect to your core? Collect email for EP downloads in advance of a new album. My point is that the value you measure from a release can be counted in traffic, downloads, and email addresses just as legitimately as in dollars.

Releases are short-term parts of a long-term career. It may make sense to maximize sales for a given release, but it depends on the career. So artists need to look at each release and come up with the plan that’s right for it and right for their career. Set measurable in goals that make sense for the specific situation. Then execute.

And please for the love of whatever: work hard.

“Why nonprofit?”

That’s usually the first question. The answer has a few parts, but starts simply: because it’s the right fit for what CASH Music is trying to do.

It’s important to understand just what it means to be a nonprofit. It doesn’t mean that the organization can’t make money, just that any money made must be put back into the mission. There can be no investors expecting returns, and a board is established to help set and oversee the organizational goals. There’s also a stack of paperwork, tax exemptions coupled with mandatory audits, and free lunch in the IRS cafeteria for the staff. Except not that last one.

My point is that we aren’t meaningfully restricted by being a nonprofit, aside from the lack of investment capital. (Okay, that is pretty meaningful but there are advantages to not being beholden to investors expecting a major return on their money.)

We explored business plans for both nonprofit and for-profit options. Some went further than others, but in the end we just had more ways to do what we wanted as a nonprofit. Yeah, it’s a harder road at first, but it allows us to focus on merit-based help as much as economically-driven initiatives. We can operate more openly going forward, and ultimately put effort into directly assisting/advising artists, reaching out to music lovers, and building tools that are driven by artists and the communities supporting them.

What we’re aiming to build isn’t a destination site, but a suite of tools, services, and opportunities for artists, listeners, labels, and anyone involved in the music ecosphere. We’d like all of it it be able to help build new music models, kick-start new businesses, and support existing organizations and artists. I know — lofty goals for a young organization. But taking an open, and open-source approach to tech allows anyone to benefit from our work, and will encourage all of the above. And while there are open-source models that make sense in some for-profit models, going nonprofit is a natural fit.

Nonprofit status offers other advantages as we grow and become more established. In many ways it helps us stay flexible in a complicated environment. We can suggest alternatives to our own technology if it’s a better fit for a specific artist or project. In the future we plan on putting major efforts into education, outreach, and even arts funding. These elements all complement the current technology push, and together form a more complete vision for CASH Music. We’ll provide case studies and research; grants for emerging artists or music/tech innovation. Knowledge and funding coupled with tech development.

This is a very simplified version of a not particularly simple idea. But hopefully it’s enough to understand our thinking and why we felt it was important to push forward as a nonprofit. More than anything this structure allows us to work directly with artists and listeners, everyone feeling true ownership in the project. Because it’s not mine. Not the shareholders’. CASH Music exists to serve music, and anyone that participates shares a claim.

Not to ruin a perfectly good hippie ending, but I wanted to say thank you to all the people who wrote in after my last post. Please feel free to keep emailing/commenting. It’s very important to me that this is as public a dialog as possible. On that note, one thing that was brought up by a few people who emailed was a lack of a specific call to action. They’re right. So we’re still working on details, but we’re planning to roll out a very specific awareness/fundraising campaign soon.

Just wanted to mention that. Now back to our regularly scheduled end-of-post. Thanks.

There isn’t much doubt that the CD is on life support. At best. But in the last week I saw a few telling signs, the first of which is the title to this post. “High-quality Jewelcase” is a bullet on a sales page for a new release. No, really. It’s for a release that, frankly, deserves better. It’s a fairly high-profile artist, and CASH built the press site so I know its a decent record.

The release page was built by Topspin, looks really nice, and offers their usually excellent array of purchasing options. At the low end you get a digital download, and on the high-end you get a whole pile of stuff to go along with your digial+vinyl release. But it’s the low-end where it’s really interesting. You can buy the album digitally for $9.99, or you can “upgrade” to CD for $14.99. The offering is identical, save one point:

Yeah, the high quality jewelcase. I’m paying $5 more for plastic.

Now in reality, you’re probably getting more complete liner notes, additional art, etc. But everything that goes into making the jewelcase *should* be included as a PDF in the digital download. (Check out the downloads at renminbi.cashmusic.org.) Fair warning, I didn’t buy the digital so it may be in there — and in no way am I saying that it’s not in there. What I’m saying is that done right, a digital release should contain every scrap of the physical — except the $5 plastic.

My other big issue is the price-point for digital. $9.99? That’s basically the Apple-says-so pricing model, established because folks have been paying $12+ dollars per album for years, so the market will probably bear it. But why? Distributing digitally is cheaper and easier. You can make a really nice chunk at a price-point in the $5-$7 range, and that’ll get more folks listening to the music, becoming fans, and ultimately willing to swim in the high-end of the merch pool rather than the low-end.

Better digital packaging and proper price-points are sort of a big issue for me. So I’m just rehashing a standard rant here, and I’ll probably do it again in the future. I’m sorry. But the real thing that inspired me to write today is my daughter, Violet.

Violet is two-and-a-half, rad, and no stranger to music. My earbud headphones were her first real lesson in sharing, and we’ll sit and listen to music together as much as we can.

So as Violet and I were heading out to the playground yesterday a FedEx truck pulls up. This is a thrill for any two-and-a-half year old, and the cherry on top was that the package was for us. Whoa! So we open up a care package from Whitesmith Entertainment (WAY more on them soon) and find CDs from Sydney Wayser and Emilyn Brodsky. (Both are fantastic, by the way. If I have time I’ll write proper reviews, but wow…great!)

I hand Violet a CD to open, and this is where things get telling. First she asks “what is it Papa, a movie?”

Me: “no, it’s music.”

V: “it’s not music Papi, it’s plastic!”

I couldn’t make up a better line. And the happy ending? She takes out the CD, decides it makes a nice POP sound when she pulls the disc off the tray, and tells me she can make music with it.

After a pause she puts in on the ground and tells me she wants to blow bubbles on it.

Violet’s still little and there’s a lot in this world she’s thankfully naive about. But in the difference between music and plastic she’s dead-on. And if we’ve resorted to selling CDs based on the quality of the jewelcase then I think the final knell for the format isn’t long off.

The short version: I need to talk about CASH Music more than I do. So I’ll blog at least once a week, and Twitter more openly. I’m swamped trying to keep up with the demands of CASH Music, but it’s the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. There are people ready to join the effort, but I’m still working on how to make that happen. And I’m asking for help — not just donations but belief and support in spreading the word. Thanks.

I spend a lot of time talking about artists, music that I love, and people that are involved with CASH Music. The artists, the music — they’re where the passion driving CASH lies, so I rarely talk about CASH itself. But that has to change if CASH is ever to realize it’s potential. I’m not always comfortable talking about myself, and to a degree I extend that to my organization. So today I’m making a resolution to talk more, tell the story behind CASH Music, honest for all the good and the bad.

That story needs to start with a simple, but mostly unknown truth: to this point CASH has largely been a one person effort. CASH Music and, well, me are fairly interchangeable.

That’s not at all to take away from the amazing support and help I’ve gotten from scores of people. (Scores. Really! I made a list.) A lot of people have played roles and theirs will be the stories that drive CASH going forward. I want to tell those stories, but it was suggested (strongly) that I start with the story of how we got here, lowering all defenses and talking about myself.

So hi. I’m Jesse von Doom. Nice to meet you.

I’m the Executive Director of CASH Music. I’ve also been the primary back-end developer. And the primary front-end developer. The designer behind every page except our current homepage. I talk to the artists. I talk to the managers. I talk to the labels. I talk to other companies. I write most of the copy. And you get the point.

To date there are over 30 artist projects on CASH Music using the code I’ve strung together.  That spans about 18 months, with a few of those projects in constant metamorphosis. Many of them have been pre-release projects for artists or labels to bring music to the press. Others are private projects shared between artists and select groups of fans. And then there are the public projects. All of them are tailored to the need, designed from the ground up, and extend the codebase. Throwing out a list of names:

50FOOTWAVE, Adam Gnade, Apollo Sunshine, Buraka Som Sistema, Colourmusic, Creative Commons, The Dandy Warhols, Deerhoof, Donita Sparks, Fischerspooner, Kristin Hersh, Learning Music, Lushlife, Marnie Stern, Portugal. The Man, RENMINBI, The Secret Machines, The Thermals, The Vines, Throwing Muses, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Xiu Xiu

In all honesty I’m listing names because I’m proud of them. But also so you’ll know that this work has all been done with high expectations. And its a lot of work. All-in it adds up to between fifty and seventy hours a week, generally trending towards the latter. Not all that different from anyone heading a startup, except for a few points:

• CASH Music is unfunded. No angel money, no investors, nothing.
   
• CASH Music is a nonprofit organization in the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and we’ve got pending 501(c)3 status on the Federal level. But until that status shifts from ‘pending’ to ‘approved’ there’s no grant money and fundraising is a lot more difficult.
   
• I need to work side-jobs, odd-jobs, and even odder-jobs on top of those hours to make ends meet.
   
• And building a nonprofit doesn’t come with an exit strategy. Unlike a traditional for-profit startup I don’t hold any ownership and can’t sell the business. The goal is to create an organization that I believe needs to exist, and my personal hope is that the organization will be able to pay me a livable wage.
   
• And one last point about artist projects: the most CASH has ever charged for a single project is $300, and more than half have been done for free because the music was worthy, the people involved had a need, and the work would further the platform. Yes artists are contributing to ensure our costs are covered, but some simple math shows that the livable wage goal is still on the to-do pile.

I’m afraid this is going to come across as me complaining. Nothing could be further from the truth…I feel lucky to have come this far with CASH. I’m just trying to create a backdrop. To show the harsh truth so as I write more people will understand why it’s so exciting for me to see CASH go from “me” to “we” as it grows.

I also want it known that this is a labor of love. No. A labor of need. Of demand. Something that has to happen and no matter how foolish it might look to someone, the mission had to start being served now. Immediately.

The vision for CASH Music isn’t easy to take in all at once. We (yes ‘we’) picture an organization that builds open-source software that handles media, manages people, drives campaigns, assists commerce, provides statistics, helps artists release music, and helps listeners enjoy music. No single model, but tools to enable models to be built bespoke for an artist. Or by an artist. We see the organization providing hosting for these tools as a cohesive platform, open and shaped by its users. We plan on studying what’s working and what’s not, providing analysis, thinking, and guidance in a public archive. And looking longer term we hope to establish grants for emerging artists, public music, and innovative projects.

The tech development started long ago. There are proofs-of-concept — some dating back almost two years — over 30 of them. Analysis and statistics have influenced each new project as it starts. And grants? We’ll get there.

The people are starting to come into place, and I’ll introduce them all here in time. CASH has an amazing board that I’m proud to work with. We’ve got the help of some great business thinkers, a few gifted volunteer developers, and people who are increasingly generous with their time. As a team takes shape, my job is to find a way to start paying us all. We’ve got a plan for revenue once the platform launches, so it’s just about getting there.

So why am I writing all this? Well, first to simply start the story. But also to ask for help. And I’m not talking only about donations though they are an amazing help and appreciated more than I can adequately express. I’m also talking about spreading the word. Tell your friends, Tweet about @cashmusic, find the Facebook group, talk about it on your blog. I’m asking you to start listening to this story. That’s the first step in believing. And I guess I was wrong above. My job isn’t to find money. It’s to make people believe in this project as much as I do.

I’ll write progress reports here at least once a week. If you want to know more, just ask. Or wait a few days and read more. If you have something to say, please say it.

I’m here to talk. You can write me at jesse [at] cashmusic [dot] org. You can drop me a line on Twitter @jessevondoom. And I promise I’ll even read the comments on this blog.

Thanks for taking the time to read all of this. I know it’s a lot, but it was the least I could say.