The music industry has been in constant flux since the advent of the internet, what with MP3’s and digital downloads, band websites, then MySpace Pages followed by Facebook and Twitter, not to mention email, online street teams, Youtube videos, Podcasts , online CD sales and all the rest making it easy to feel a little lost in this new and strange digital world. You’re a musician, right? Your job is to make music… isn’t it? Yes it is, but today things have changed, you’ve got to be your own publicist, promoter, social networking expert and everything else – even if you have one each of these already. To really succeed in the music biz now, especially as a newcomer, you pretty much have to learn to use the internet – in all its shapes and forms. Not only that, but you should embrace it, as the possibilities are endless, if a little (okay, a lot) confusing, but that’s what CashMusic.org is here for.
CashMusic.org is a non-profit and open-source organization whose 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.”
What the organization is actually doing, is building digital tools for musicians to use on their sites to help build their own communities and share their music online easily and at no cost – meaning they’re doing all the hard technical work for you – like writing the code and doing the other work necessary to issue download codes for fans and embed audio files on your site – so that you can get back to the real work at hand that you would be concentrating on if you didn’t have to worry about the internet – writing, recording and performing music.
So far CashMusic.org has quite a list of musicians, bands and labels on board, including Amanda Palmer , Portugal the Man, and Iron and Wine, so if you want to be on the list of members to utilise this new and great and free open source ‘no programming’ digital platform for musicians, check them out and download their code today. And if you’re feeling generous and want to help out a non-profit organization that seeks sustainability for artists, they also accept donations.
