FAQ
- Why open source?
- Why a 501(c)3 nonprofit?
- How do you choose who you work with?
- So what exactly are you building?
- How will you make enough money to keep the organization going?
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Why open source?
Open source projects have unleashed massive innovation for developers and corporations. Moreover Wordpress has given rise to a new class of journalist - the blogger. No one can stop software engineers from making Linux and Wordpress a better product for their users. Their users gain a powerful set of tools at their fingertips and directly influence its growth. We intend to step in these open source projects shoes. We want nothing less than a sustainable business for musicians worldwide.
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Why a 501(c)3 nonprofit?
The real difference between a for-profit and a true nonprofit has nothing to do with money-making, but rather where that money goes. A traditional corporation has an obligation to its shareholders and while they can do a lot of good, the primary responsibility is to serve those investors. A 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation has to adhere to certain US Federal guidelines, and the primary responsibility is to serve its mission.
We still need to make money, and we can be entrepreneurial about that. But any money made will be put directly back into our initiatives and it's all a matter of public record. So all fundraisers and fees will be put back towards creating tools and services that build sustainability for artists and music — and you'll be able to see exactly how we're doing it.
That kind of transparency is good for the music industry, and not needing an "exit strategy" means we're building something to last. Artists need not worry about CASH being sold to a larger company because we can't legally be sold or even owned.
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How do you choose who you work with?
Most of the artists featured on our site fall in the "friends and family" category and were kindly willing to help work with us to design the features and interaction driving our code. So far we've worked on over 60 projects, all helping us get closer to releasing a larger platform with a diverse feature set. While we're still working on specific projects, our focus has been shifting to general platform development so we can release more code in the wild for all artists to use.
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So what exactly are you building?
To date we've released the Javascript components we use to power our projects and two PHP/Javascript mini-apps for Twitter and Facebook promotion. These are really "developer previews" — fully functional but not the easiest things to use.
We're currently working on three main products:
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Flower, our Javascript components refined and easier to implement. These will provide developers with a great deal of UI/UX power and flexibility, but will be easy enough to set up and use that anyone with a website will be able to copy and paste a few lines and have them working. You'll see audio players, video and image lightboxes, and all sorts of small enhancements. -
Seed, a robust PHP toolkit intended to power music websites. Including social promotion, download codes, audio player environments, email gathering, commerce, and more; Seed will come with an elegant and easy-to-use installer script. The goal is to enable anyone to be able to install cutting edge music tech on their own server — think wordpress.org for music. -
Version 1.0 of our server platform, nicknamed 'Birch.' Birch will provide all the functionality in Seed but with the ease of a hosted web app and the power of Python and all it's accompanying libraries. Birch will also handle more server-intense processes like media encoding, scheduled tasks, and data processing. All this coupled with a fully open and secure API will allow Birch to work smoothly with any Seed installation, providing for nearly any configuration an artist needs.
All of the above will be fully open source, with Javascript components licensed under a BSD license, and all other components released using an AGPL license.
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How will you make enough money to keep the organization going?
Like any other nonprofit we plan on finding a portion of our budget from grants, corporate fundraising, and private philanthropy. We're also planning fundraising events and a membership drive that will allow people to commit not only financial support but add ideas and energy to the organization. And like any venture we've got a few other ideas that aren't quite fully cooked yet. More on those in a bit, but one thing's for sure: none of our revenue will come from taking a mandatory cut of artist sales. (That'd defeat the purpose a bit.)
