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Installing and using the CASH platform is still a little more technical than we’d like. That said, it’s not beyond your reach — whoever you are — and we’re working to make it easier.

We thought we’d run through the process of setting up a simple site and grab more screenshots than you can shake a stick at. Seriously…just try shaking a stick at all these screenshots. The result is four short guides that will help you set up a one-page site with email collection and a news feed powered by a Tumblr account. It’s easy to follow, and should take no more than an hour including installation.

The tutorial includes a small template so you’ll see the results of your efforts right away, and none of the guides has more than five steps so you can take snack breaks.

Here they are:

1. Installation
2. Change your password
3. Site build part 1: add elements for your page
4. Site build part 1: embed elements into a template

Enjoy!

Last week we snuck out the first officially supported version of our platform. It’s a hands-on look into where we’re headed and brings a few useful pieces of functionality to the table today — with a rapid update schedule on the horizon and supported one-click updates.

So what is it? The CASH platform has been designed to be an easy-to-use tool that can work with your existing site or become the foundation of a new site. At the core of our mission as a nonprofit is sustainability for musicians, and to that end we want to work with other services not just compete with them. So we built something that lets you manage your world locally but pull in third-party services and data — all that rolls into what we’re calling “elements.” Elements give you the power to embed the things you need on your site with a single line of code you copy and paste from a simple web form.

So what can you do with it today? For us this is the foundation, and you’ll need to be comfortable pasting a line or two (literally) into a PHP file. The elements available are just the tip of the iceberg, and we’ve been building a lot under the water. Currently this works really well to pull in Tumblr and Twitter feeds; merging, sorting, filtering, and styling them. It can collect emails for you, and even provide email-for-download as long as you can upload your download. It’s also good at displaying tourdates, and we’re working on making it even easier to enter them. Step-by-step walkthroughs for each of these are on the way.

With every release we aim to add significant functionality as well as making the interface easier to use. So in addition to polishing the usability, our next release will bring playlists and basic commerce — functionality that we’ve finished but need a little more time to gracefully work into the framework and interface. The other thing high-up on the list is our WordPress plugin, which will lower the technical bar. Expect a full and detailed roadmap soon.

We’re still working to make the installer work in as many places as possible, but some hosts disallow features that it requires. We’ll release a more in-depth installation guide for folks unable to use the installer, and we’re continuously working to make the install process as smooth as possible, so look for more on that front too.

If you do install things, please leave a comment and let us know what you think — we’ve built all of this hand-in-hand with artists and want to continue building with a community not just for one.

The kitchen sink:
For those who care about the details, here’s a quick run-down of some of the more exciting technical points that we’ll revisit in detail later:

• Analytics. We don’t have the fancy visualizations yet, but everything is tracked. Every asset download is tied to an element, elements are all tied to where they came from, and we keep an independent session variable so you can see visitor paths through your site. All respecting the privacy of your fans and not getting creepy.
• Identity. When you collect email addresses we’ll verify them for you with an email, or if you like you can skip that step or even sync to a mail provider and let them do it. Better yet, we’ve built deep integration with Mozilla’s BrowserID project, allowing all users to identify themselves using a single, trusted login from a trusted nonprofit in the open-source space.
• Contacts. Right now you’ll see list management meaning you can target specific lists from individual elements, but in the core framework we have the ability to add and manage contacts…so in the near future we’ll open that up so you can import your people, work with them, give them access to private resources, and even do basic relationship management.
• Multiple users. The framework supports multiple admin users and wholly separate accounts, so as we’re working with the admin app we’ll be enabling multiple accounts and even things like account sharing where you can authorize someone else to help you run things.
• Connections. We’ve got a connection manager that makes it easy to manage the third-party connections you use. It also makes it easy for us to define connection types, so look for us to add services and continue to make this an important part of our platform.
• API. API’s are the new markup. Every major webapp has one, so now your site does too. We’re only using this a tiny bit now, but it’s the piece that’ll make publishing your stuff as easy as embedding a YouTube video.
• Functionality. Lots more in the works. Playlists and commerce. Guestlist management and giveaways. Contacts and private streams. Download codes. Deeper and better social media integration. This is just the start.

It’s time we start recognizing that the music industry isn’t just business. It’s a natural-resource industry, starting with art and moving into the business space. All of us who are lucky enough to be a part of this business also need to recognize and nurture the music for the resource it is. It’s a core and inseparable part of all our lives. Without a healthy economy for musicians, no form of monetization or marketing would be enough to build a sustainable business.

So that’s why this article on Fast Company made me so upset. In it, MOG CEO David Hyman claims to have “no idea” how or what artists are paid. I understand that all deals are different and it’s a complicated business, but claiming no knowledge of an artist’s situation is unacceptable to me. Ask. Talk to artists, listen to their thoughts, and don’t hide behind the convenience of simply dealing with labels. Every other industry holds businesses at least partially responsible for the entire supply chain: loggers plant trees and electronics manufacturers are held accountable if outsourced factory workers are suffering inhumane conditions.

So I say that the “new” music industry innovators are equally responsible, in part, for the health and sustainability of the artist community their businesses are built atop. I’m not calling for them to change their deals or renegotiate with labels, but for anyone to claim they “can’t” give back to artists is bullshit. So is throwing up your arms or hiding behind lines like “well the artists signed the deals…”

Any VC backed company should know about the need to raise capital, and anyone with a salary has no right to criticize an artist making a living however they can. The current “disruption” is hurting artists and will not last without considering them and their art as part of the equation.

Topspin, Bandcamp, Bandzoogle, Official.fm, SoundCloud, eMusic, and Rdio are all building businesses that keep the artist in mind. Some directly empower artists while others find offerings like affiliate programs and APIs that directly enhance artist websites or their bottom lines.

For streaming services like MOG, Rdio, and Spotify I think it’s vital that they do whatever they can to recognize artists in their ecosystem and not lose their most important resource. The music. The first and most powerful thing they can do is to give power over profile information and purchase links to artists. Yes there are challenges and maybe loss of some bonus revenue — but it means giving back and creating an atmosphere of beneficial discovery for artists.

Other ideas could be to establish recording and performance grants for artists, contribute open-source tools to the artist community, and to open new APIs focussed on promotion and and non-monetized artist well-being.

Please. If you’re building a business rooted in music you must respect and keep musicians in your plans. If you do not you are building something toxic to the music ecosystem.

One last note: be nice. Saying things like “I don’t know why indies would be different than a major. Maybe because nobody is listening to their music?” not only makes you look like an asshole, but it makes you sound very ignorant of the music world as a whole. Independent labels and musicians are a huge part of our mainstream culture, and that’s obvious unless you’re only looking at half the Grammy winners.

For those that are unfamiliar with the concept of “testing code” or “test driven development,” it is the habit of writing code to ensure that other code works correctly. It is a very valuable habit.

Imagine you have pile of code Foo, which is exercised by a different pile of code Bar. If you wanted to sound fancy, you would call Foo “the implementation” and Bar your “test suite.” The point of the test suite is to ensure that the implementation works correctly.

Some of the simplest and most useful tests to write are syntax checking tests. Does every file in Foo pass a syntax check? If not, surely bugs are lurking.

So, of course, the first kinds of tests that I wrote for CASH Music were syntax check tests, which have already proved useful in finding some issues.

The next step in making tests useful is to get them automagically run on each commit to the DIY repo, also known as ‘continuous integration’. CASH Music uses Jitterbug to run tests on each commit to Github, and it even has a pretty web interface to show off the data. This makes it very easy to see exactly which commit “breaks the test suite,” i.e. causes at least one test to fail. Knowing exactly which commit breaks something is invaluable when things are being changed and fixed rapidly.

Recently I helped to add SQLite support to our command-line developer installer. The primary motive was to make it easy for developers to test out CASH Music without needing a MySQL database, but the secondary motive was to deploy the CASH Music schema to SQLite in our test suite so database-dependent stuff can be tested. Since CASH Music is predominantly database-dependent interaction, this is absolutely necessary for good test coverage.

After SQLite was working, I created a test installer which is really just a pared down developer installer which sets up a DIY instance specifically to run tests. This has recently allowed us to write some basic tests for CASHRequest which is a central component of DIY that just about everything else relies on.

But why do we test? What is the big deal? Doesn’t it take extra time? Is it really worth it?

The chasm between tested and untested code is wide. One one side, if your test suite passes you can be confident that you’ve made a change and it didn’t break something. On the other side, any change, possibly only a single line or character has the possibility to break some other seemingly unrelated part of your codebase. The only way to be sure is to manually go through, attempting to exercise a large portion of your code to ensure nothing broke. As your codebase goes from dozens to thousands of lines of code, this quickly becomes infeasible. In these cases, developers change stuff and hope for the best, which is hardly a strategy at all.

Testing does take extra time, but it also measurably increases the code quality as well as giving developers the agility to quickly change and adapt code.

So is it really worth it to test CASH Music? The way I see it, our lives are continually being entangled with code. What if that DNA-refactoring-with-Xrays machine at the airport has a bug in it? What if self-driving robotic cars that are trying to capture “street views” start mowing down cute innocent pedestrians or worse, their pets? Bugs in code are now intimately entangled with the physical meatspace that we live in.

Since artists will depend on our codebase, we are not taking bugs lightly. The only way CASH Music is going to roll is with a well-tested and easy-to-use platform that artists and labels can rely on.

Having to download and install software on your web server sucks. The thing is: it doesn’t have to. The hardest part about building a platform like the one we’re building is making it easy to use. That starts with making it easy to install.

Most of our releases lately have been showing off new features, what the world will see when you use the CASH platform. But this one is a peek at what you’ll see. It’s the installer for the platform, and you’ll get to poke around our in-progress admin panel, warts and all. There are empty sections and blank pages, many of the forms will change, and literally everything is subject to rapid iteration and potentially sweeping change.

So this isn’t a final release, but it is a working release that will hopefully show how easy it will be to add our platform to your website. There’s a single file to download. Upload it via FTP and visit the file in a browser. From there our installer will grab the latest version of the platform, install it, and configure a basic SQLite database for you to use.

The installer will ask only two questions, then spit out login credentials.

You’ll have copies of all current demos on your server plus the admin panel. The admin is organized into five main sections: Assets, People, Commerce, Calendar — the moving parts — and Elements. Elements are the analog to widgets, taking advantage of everything from the other sections. An app-store style view of music tech, each element is a specific workflow that lets you do something different on your site. (Like email-for-download, parsing social streams, displaying tourdates, etc.)

Play around, but with the caveat that future versions will likely make breaking changes so this can’t be upgraded. We’ll keep the installer up to date so you’ll have hands-on access to all new demos and functionality as hey come out. We’re spending a lot more time on the admin right now so expect to see the holes fill in as new demos roll out.

 
Download the installer now

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.