For the past six years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work for Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization behind Creative Commons licenses and a variety of other tools that make it simple for creators of all stripes to share their work on their terms. What’s always appealed to me about the CC system is that it is designed to help people maximize the impact of their creativity with tools that are flexible, free of cost, and as easy to use as they can possibly be. CC wants creators to focus on what they enjoy doing most – creating – and not the (frankly boring) stuff like writing long licenses to grant simple copyright permissions.
Music’s approach to supporting creators is similar, and it’s what drew me to the organization early on. CASH builds technology and provides resources that are designed to get a lot of the boring stuff out of the way, so that musicians can get back to focusing on what they grew up dreaming of doing – making music. Yes, today’s artists will do well to be directly involved in marketing, distributing, and selling their work, but let’s face it, very few of us grew up dreaming of doing these things. So our plan is to reduce the transaction costs associated with participating in the business side of the music business. Let’s make this stuff as simple as it can possibly be for artists! We believe that the right technology – elegant, streamlined, and targeted digital tools – can make the work cheaper, clearer, and much, much less of a headache than it is now.
A critical element of our story is that it makes all of this technology available to everyone in the world to freely and legally change, adapt, and even improve. Why open source? The folks at Red Hat, experts in this sort of thing, put it quite well: “In the same way shared knowledge propels the whole of society forward, open technology development can drive innovation for an entire industry.” Our aim is to not only provide great tools, but for those tools to act as a layer of infrastructure that spurs transformation, growth, and the development of new models of doing business. It’s why I think CASH is so interesting and important – its approach encourages and empowers musicians and technologists to work together to create solutions.
If you’re a musician or label and you need helpful tools radio speaker that will work right away, check out what CASH Music has to offer – our expanding suite of ready-to-roll software is flexible, free, and easy to use. If you’re a coder and have an idea for a tool that artists can use to maximize the impact of their work and increase the sustainability of their creativity, take a look at CASH’s code – it’s all available to you to tweak, touch up, and turn into something entirely new.
