I was having this conversation on Saturday...

I'm hanging with my new musical buddy George Kilby. He's decided to upgrade his website so we're doing a consult to get a feel for what direction we're going to move him in (pardon my grammar). He said something at one point about a friend of his who'd decided to totally forgo having their own website in favor of just managing their presence through Facebook and a couple of other social sites.

I'm kicking myself for not having a canned response as to why I think that's a bad idea, but I guess i hadn't really thought about it too much in a while.

In my humble opinion...

I can totally understand why an artist would do that. It's a hassle to manage your own website. There's tons of traffic already happening for free over on Facebook, they already have most of the goodies that a band website needs to have built for you, and you've got to spend half your life posting all this crap there again anyway. Why not just skip the middle man?

To me it's two things – branding and informational liberty.

Branding

If you fold up your own website and just manage your presence through mySpace or Facebook or Reverb Nation, you're effectively subordinating your brand to theirs. I don't mean to suggest that you are bigger than Facebook, but to me it almost implies that Facebook or MySpace owns you if you send your potential fans there instead of a property of your own. Would a “normal” business send people to MySpace instead of having their own site? No! They want to make money...

Informational liberty

I have some friends in a band. They've moved their main website onto a platform called Ning. Ning is a well funded company that aims to make the process of building a “social network” something that anyone can do. It's sort of like the old days of having your own message board on your site, except with the features one would expect of a modern social network. They have a pretty decent system for listing their tour dates, and maintaining the info is pretty easy. It doesn't cost that much and it works well, so what's the problem?

What if they every want to do something different? What happens when the day comes that they want to do something that Ning won't let them do (or won't let them do at a price they can afford), like maybe host and sell their own digital downloads or build a design template that's outside the parameters of what Ning allows?

They're faced with a tough decision. On the one hand they don't have access to tools that they'd like to use to promote their band. On the other hand they shutter a social network that they've asked their fans to join and be a part of, one that has been a definite success so far. Maybe it's not an issue right now and maybe it won't be that big of one ever, but by inviting their fans to create a community around them using proprietary software that they'll never fully control they're rolling the dice that Ning (or whoever ultimately buys Ning) will continue to do them and their fans right.

In summary

Better to build your own site and use that as the hub around which you organize the rest of your social accessories.

#theidea #music #business

The open source website system for musical artists

It's so obvious when I say it out loud. (edit: that's not exactly the most succinct tagline though, so help me out.)

If you're just joining the party and you don't know what open source is, check this out. If we haven't met before, this is some more of my backstory over the last year or so.

Pre-ramble

Forgive me if you've read some of this here a hundred times. Part of my process is to refine repeatedly.

I'm a musician. I'm 32. My entire professional career has been spent behind the wheel of either an upright bass, an electric bass, or a pair of turntables. In particular the years from 2003 to 2009 were spent on the road with the band Railroad Earth. About 2 years ago I started teaching myself to program. I wasn't really sure where I'd end up, but it seemed like a good skill to have for the inevitable day that I just couldn't keep touring for a living anymore.

Recent history

I quit the band and started making a living as a web programmer. I found a client who needed a me and have since been busy doing lots of nice stuff with a designer who I get along great with. About a month ago I got another gig doing a little thing for this environmental non-prof out in San Francisco. I built exactly the thing they asked me to in both Ruby on Rails and Drupal. I built the Ruby version first with lots of help from a friend in about 5 days. I spent 3 agonizing days trying to launch it on a shared webserver before giving up and rebuilding the entire thing in Drupal with 36 hours left until the deadline. The Drupal version lit up the first time I flipped on the switch and saved my bacon. I had already bought a ticket to DrupalCon – happening in San Francisco a few weeks after that.

Drupal (droo'-pul)

While at DrupalCon I drank lots and lots and lots of open source Kool-Aid. The buzz that I got at DrupalCon was exactly like the buzz I used to get at music festivals we'd play every summer. Tons of cool people hanging out, sharing ideas, drinking beer, meeting new cool people, and being excited about the same thing – the same cool, creative thing. I went to sessions for geeks, for marketing folks, for freelancers, for non-profits, for you name it.

I came back a Drupal developer.

One of the cool tools that I was introduced to there was called OpenAtrium. It's basically a tool for managing projects, a thing that becomes very necessary the instant you get off the road and start building websites. I had tried out BaseCamp with my new gig and liked it a lot. OA was essentially an open source variation, built on top of Drupal. Many of the contributions of the Drupal developer community were rolled into one comprehensive, focused package that was probably done in a fraction of the time that an enterprise team would taken to do a proprietary version of something similar.

Open source is a very powerful idea. Drupal is free. All the cool things that people have built to customize and extend Drupal are free. That's why Open Atrium is free.

The open source website system for musical artists

So a cool feature of Drupal that's only recently getting attention paid to it is the “installation profile”. That's how OA works, and it basically means that you can set up Drupal how you want it (you can quite literally do almost anything that involves the internet with Drupal) and build a script that installs it that way anywhere. You can have, for example, a real band website, for free, right out of the box. The blog, the tour dates, the Facebook and Flickr integration, the forum, the eCommerce – virtually all of the pieces are laying right there, waiting to be assembled by those of us who know how. Those of us who need something that doesn't exist yet write it and give it back to everyone else using the system. It's constantly improved. The roadmap for this thing could be ridiculously cool. The API possibilities if a bunch of people started using this thing? Come on!

I know, the irony of this being a Wordpress powered site has occurred to me, but before I go and uproot and move this blog to Drupal so that we can get to collaborating for real, does this sound like a good idea? One that could maybe change the game?

Pssst, Drupal devs...

I don't know if you've noticed, but the guys who made up OA and PressFlow and OpenPublish are making a damn decent business as consultants for their product. I don't know if there's any money to be made here or not, but this market has been waiting for this idea. Hell, Drupal has been waiting for this idea. I know a lot of people in the music biz that would probably be delighted to help us out. We can get press and we can get traction. Anybody wanna help out?

Edit: the post that put the last piece of this idea into place. Thanks, Dries!

#theidea

I realized about a year ago that nobody anywhere even had a clue, never mind a plan that saved what was worth saving about the music industry – the music part.

---

Guilty. Most of us reading this are. There were several entire generations that went by where it was a perfectly logical thing to associate money and music as somehow being comfortable companions if not downright synonymous. It was BIG business – not in the way that defense contracting is, but it was perfectly logical for a certain subset of money and attention seeking individuals to get into the music business. And you didn't even have to have musical talent! In fact, there was more money in it for those who didn't! Word eventually got around and by the late 80s most labels heads weren't music lovers but lawyers. The snake started eating its tail sometime around then. Nirvana was arguably the last great, game-changing band that came out of that entire era.

I don't mean to sound like one of those bloviating music biz pundits. So anyway –>

I've held a simple and obvious belief for a few years now while transitioning from a musician into a programmer/musician. If the internet tore down the old edifice, the internet will build the new one. There are any number of eCommerce solutions out there for bands to sell their stuff online. There are any number of solutions out there to make building your band's website an easy and code-free endeavor. There are any number of solutions out there to make it easier to spread your word. These ideas are good ones, but still missing the target (in my humblest of opinions). The basic problem with all of these ideas is that they are still trying to monetize someone else's music. That scheme is the most fundamental cornerstone of the edifice that just fell. Any successful new paradigm must throw it away.

Admittedly, it's the most difficult one to throw away. However, imagine if a community emerged in pursuit of throwing this stone away. Not just a programmer or a company trying to reinvent the wheel and somehow still feed themselves, but an ecosystem of people who did it for the good of music itself in their free time, without the pressures of business and investors and expectations on them.

Sorta like an open source project, I guess...

#theidea

So, the 14 of you that still swing by here know my backstory. Sometime in 2003 I joined a band with a neglected website. At one of my first band meetings we discussed overhauling said website, since the majority of our fanbase was a grassroots kinda thing and most of our promotion happened via online channels like the Archive and YahooGroups, etc. Sometime in 2005 we still had that same website. I was at my parent's house in north Georgia when it occurred to me “hey, you know, you could probably learn how to build websites in the time that it's going to take this band to get it together enough to hire someone to do it.” If I'd only listened to that voice more clearly, but instead I got bogged down on the Dreamweaver section of the Adobe site and gave up without really exploring what web development was all about. I was still trying to be a musician in any case.

Fastforward to 2008 and we'd finally done something about our website a few months prior. I got an iPhone. I'll skip this part of the story since it's been documented ad nauseum on this blog. Anyway, it didn't take long for the potential of mobile apps as a huge and brand-spanking-new market to become an obsession. In particular – the potential for such apps to help revitalize a music business that had become very long on the latter and very short on the former. There's also the simple fact that in 50 years people are going to be on these little things and not big old screens anymore and therefore the internet is at the very least going to need to be reformatted. So, start learning to program iPhone apps...

Hey, this is hard to do yourself and really expensive if you hire someone. Wouldn't it be cool if you could make a reusable framework for all your friends' bands so that y'all could share the cost and the rewards of such a system? Well, if you're all sharing a mobile platform, you might as well be sharing a website platform too, since most of the stuff that's gonna be on that mobile app is going to have to live somewhere on the internet. It'd be a lot easier to just interact with one protocol than a million, right? If I'm not making sense, let me know.

Well, hey if we got everyone on the same platform for their website, then we could also build in lots of features that would make those sites more interactive with the rest of the internet as a whole. I mean, who likes posting your tour dates to your own website and then to Facebook and then to MySpace (or paying someone to do that for you)? Raise your hand if you know what an API is, and why it's important. Wow, it seems like 10 years ago that I wrote that.

This was my thought process two years ago. I'll be back.

#theidea

What is open source? It can actually mean a variety of different things, but most simply it means free software that anyone can use as is or alter as they see fit for their particular needs. According to Wikipedia – “Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology.” I think I fall into both camps, but being the pragmatic, methodological guy that I am I shall present that angle today.

When I first got into software and development a few years ago it was because of one of the most proprietary devices out there – the iPhone. Proprietary is the exact opposite of open source. It is not free. You are not welcome to see the iPhone OS source code. You are not welcome to use anything except for Apple's set of development tools to build iPhone applications. You may only distribute those applications through the AppStore, of which Apple is the sole overseer. I didn't consciously realize the implications of this stuff two years ago. I just wanted to build a band app that all my friends could use and get rich. So I bought a Mac and dove in.

Upon diving in, I realized many things. One is that Apple and their set of development tools – called Xcode (X as is OS X, the Mac OS) – came with the most amazing set of documentation on virtually every aspect of developing software built right in. My education began there. Poring over the included documentation and learning how the iPhone OS and Object Oriented programming worked on a high level was the beginning of the path for me here. Among other things I learned that the Mac OS (operating system) and by extention the iPhone OS were built upon an open source OS called Unix. Unix has been around since the late 60s, and was initially developed at Bell Labs. Unix runs on the “command line”, which is like way back in the floppy disk era when you used to have to type into DOS to get your computer to run programs. Most professional developers I met at the DrupalCon a month ago seem to have a deep fear of the command line. Luckily my early experience with Rails and Git got me over that fear before I learned that I should have one.

Anyway, there are many different versions of Unix out there, some open source (meaning open to anyone helping develop it) and some proprietary (meaning you have to pay a licensing fee to even use it). Some hippies at UC Berkeley one day got tired of Ma Bell and her ridiculous licensing fees and decided to make their own variant called Free BSD. To make a long story shorter, Steve Jobs and co. took Free BSD in the late 90s and made it the base of their new OS. OS X, a really awesome, intuitive, stable operating system that only legally runs on Macintosh computers took an open source project as it's guts. What the world knows as OS X is basically a really nicely designed wrapper over top of Free BSD. If you're on a Mac and you go up to the Spotlight in the top right and type in “Terminal”, you'll get the command line for your computer. This is the real operating system you are speaking to underneath the glitsy OS X veneer.

So what's the point? Who cares? Steve Jobs ripped off a bunch of hippies and now he's a genius? Well, yes, and here's why.

Windows, the beloved, world dominating piece of shit OS that never works right whether you know it or admit it or not is not an open source project. It and it's source code have been sequestered away in Redmond WA for the last 25 years or so. The only people allowed to work on it are MS employees following MS corporate policies, coding practices, and managerial and marketing direction in their development of Windows. I liken this to being in a really high paid Connecticut wedding band. By contrast, Free BSD – though a newer OS than Windows even – comes from a pedigree of having been developed and refined for the last 40 years. Open source means anyone with the mind to can contribute to the project with only their own needs and imaginations as their guide. Ultimately what happens in a sucessful open source project is that a community of developers begins to coalesce. Different perspectives, features, and methodologies are brought in from all over the world by developers trying to solve problems, not by the marketing department downstairs or your manager who has to make his boss happy with this one feature. What would be a security hole to exploit is plainly visible for all to see and for all to immediately get on top of fixing for the good of everyone who uses that software. If you need a feature that doesn't exist yet, you write it yourself and share with everyone in the community. I liken this to participating in the late night jam at Slopryland.

That's probably enough for now.

#theidea

At least these guys get the clean thing. There's a raft of interesting content up there, and all you have to do is sign up on their page to get access to it all. “Inbound marketing” I believe the savvy would call it. Applause, please..

#theidea

Here's a band with the resources to do something cooler than they are. Is it just me or is this front page totally overstuffed with info, rendering it almost impossible to glean the useful bits at a glance? Are the links at the top of the page really 2003 looking? Are there an obscene amount of links on the right border that take forever to load?

Or is it just me?

Edit: I count 16 banners of equal size and flashiness (90% of which point to the same merchandise page) on the right margin and 30 or so news items. I'm all about having interesting content on the front page, but this looks like our shoe closet. And we don't wear most of the shoes that we own....

Another edit: I wrote this post the week before the Hampton victory frothing ceremony. They've obviously had a recent injection of motivation capital and have gotten their web game back together a bit.

#theidea

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....

next post

#theidea #music #business

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters everywhere requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to dream of a better way....

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all websites are not created equal, yet they are endowed by their creators with the potential to be entertaining, informative, and even useful in a utilitarian sense. That to secure these ideals, most bands stumble blindly about with no technical idea of what's involved in actually building a modern website, that the layout and information contained in your average band website has been virtually untouched for several years in a field where technology is changing every day. That the potential for truly democratizing the music industry has never been more at hand than it is today. That nobody in the business of selling records is interested in seeing a better system devised. That the only way forward for the record industry is via the ubiquitous distribution system present in every one of your homes. That the only way to achieve such independence is to fight for change, to take up development tools, and to learn what bands and the music business are doing wrong, and to right these wrongs.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that those of us yearning for change learn as much as we can about the technologies available, so that we may make best use of them and not stumble where so many of our brethren have before. This blog shall henceforth detail my quest to overhaul the sorry state of affairs that is the music recording industry, so that it may brighten all of our lives forevermore...

#theidea #music #business

So, if you're in a band and you don't have a website, you're not really a band, right? If you own a business and you don't have a website, your business doesn't really exist, right? If you ran a festival, could you see how you could get by without having a website?

The iPhone, and the mobile platform in general, is going to be the means by which info is spread, by which content is delivered, by which people are entertained and kept in the loop. The portable website, but better. Can we all agree on that much?

#theidea