CASH Music Launches Free Hosted Platform With Web Tools For DIY Musicians
CASH Music, a "nonprofit organization that builds open source tools for musicians," has launched a hosted version of their free platform designed to help artists take care of business. This will be excellent news for DIY musicians and indie labels who can't afford developers to help them puzzle out the realities of open source. It's still in beta but you can check it out now and help CASH Music with your feedback.
CASH Music has been developing a free, open source platform of tools artists need to "control their own careers." If you're a developer, you can check out the Platform overview on GitHub and find some related info on CASH Music Support.
Their announcement of the hosted version includes the following info:
"The whole idea for the platform is that you bring your accounts, connect them, and use what you already have to make what you need. So connect your Paypal account and your S3 account and sell a download. Connect your MailChimp and your Google Drive: email for download. We provide the workflow, a page you can publish, and an easy (and customizable) HTML5 embed code so you can make it live anywhere."
"Right now the platform does a good job with digital sales, download codes, email collection and email for download promo, downloads via login, and some fun with social networking. We’ll be documenting all that stuff and providing demos in the coming weeks."
You can sign up here to get in on the beta testing phase.
It's a quick process and once you've logged in you land on the Main Page with five categories which are further detailed on their Getting started page:
"Assets: Files, releases, and playlists. Basically anything you'll work on or use for fulfillment somewhere else in the platform."
"People: Email and permission lists, contacts, and press coverage. Right now this is mainly for email lists, but this is where you'll see more social integration and tools for interacting with people — from followers to writers and fans."
"Commerce: Review your orders and set up new items to sell."
"Calendar: Shows and venues."
"Elements: How you publish everything else to the outside world. Very much like the 'widget' idea, elements are bundles for functionality you can publish to your site with a single line of code."
Even if you don't want to be part of the beta but could use such tools, you might want to go ahead and set up an account and get a look. It's all free and they say it will always be free, just like Facebook, except it's yours to control.
More:
- Cash Music Needs Our Help To Build Free Open Source Tools For Musicians
- D.I.Y. Bootcamp: Cash Music & The Open Source Revolution
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/App.net) also blogs at All World Dance: Videos and maintains Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
“By submitting or posting User Content on the Services, you grant CASH Music a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such User Content for the sole purpose of providing the Services.”
No wonder it’s free.
‘Perpetual’ and ‘Irrevocable’ are usually very scary terms in music contracts – just in case, they mean forever and you can’t take your stuff down – and then we also have ‘fully sub – licensable’ so they can license your work in hwtaever manner they choose, to anyone.
oh and they also throw in royalty-free too. so they don’t ever have to pay you.
No thanks, and i nearly didn’t read the terms..
sorry i missed ‘create derivative works’ so they can make covers, edits, remixes and again you get nothing. piss take, stay well away.
Hi,
I’m the ED of CASH. We asked our lawyers to specifically add that “for the sole purpose of providing the Services” line for a reason. We’re not doing anything with content that you add, but legally we’re required to have a license if you’re uploading it to our servers.
The “for the sole purpose of providing the Services” is a really important bit. We can’t resell your stuff. We take no ownership. We cannot take any action with your content without you actively using our services for the purpose the content is being used.
You’ll also note the standard boilerplate about not reverse engineering our software is countered by:
“Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in these Terms, the Services and Content may include software components provided by CASH Music or a third party that are subject to separate license terms, in which case those license terms will govern such software components.”
And 100% of the code is licensed with open source licenses negating all of the boilerplate.
We’re a nonprofit providing a service. Our lawyers advised us to keep the language and add wide exceptions, rather than remove the language itself. So we did. If you’re a lawyer and you think that’s wrong we’ve provided a repo on github where we’re tracking our own licenses in the public eye and we’ll take suggestions for changes:
https://github.com/cashmusic/legal
Oh and to be clear: all file hosting is currently done by connecting to your own S3 or Google Drive account. So you can take anything down easily. It’s yours.
We’re just a nonprofit organization providing an open-source solution connecting to your stuff.
Jesse, thanks for explaining. I find this stuff really confusing and, clearly, so do others.
Jesse,
Thanks for replying – i’m a musician, not a lawyer, so i’m no expert by any means. There is absolutely no need though, i think, for the words ‘perpetual’ and ‘irrevocable’ in your T.o.S
They should be replaced by ‘for the term of this agreement,’ and ‘which can be terminated at any time by either party,’ after which the company will have a reasonable time to delete the artists’ files. Yes?