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Chicago Workshop Overview
The idea driving the workshop is to embrace the best of hack days, q&a sessions, and cooperative learning. We're not looking to make this about CASH Music — if anything we're looking to make CASH Music about the people attending these summits. We've always worked directly with musicians to build our software, and the workshop day is an attempt to do that at scale by bringing musicians, coders, and industry experts from all sides together.
There's no competition. The event is free and open to the public. All perspectives are welcome and we want to brainstorm new ideas, document them, and start building. We talk about themes here in terms of CASH Music, but any and all tools, platforms, and ideas are welcome here.
In addition to building in the big space we're running side sessions in smaller rooms/areas. The times are mostly open so attendees can propose sessions the day of the event.
Most of the stuff we've built at CASH has been foundational. Making sure artists can manage download codes, handling basic commerce directly, managing lists, etc. We believe that it's important for musicians to control their own web presence and we've focused on that almost exclusively so far. But having that control shouldn't mean you give up on a connected web — as a matter of fact that's where most of the benefit lies. So we're thinking a lot about other aspects of how the open web can benefit musicians.
There's a lot of talk about identity online, but nearly all of it focuses on individual identity. How can we better serve artists by building tools to better understand band and project identity online — perhaps pulling together Twitter, Rhapsody, Spotify, and other APIs to first identify and "verify" an artist's website and then go so far as to crawl a site and find evidence of discoverable API services, primary links to their work, etc. The closer we get to this the closer we are to a web where artists can control their own fates.
A huge priority for us in 2014 is federation — building connections between instances of our software so they can work together. The simplest way to explain the value is this: imagine going to an artist's site, buying their whole back catalog in a single order, and having that order fulfilled by multiple independent labels. This lets the artist increase sales (by not having to split off to multiple label sites), makes fulfillment easier, and is more convenient for the fan. Extend the possibilities to independent artists selling their work together, to natural (non-algorithm) discovery models, etc.
Other priorities here are simply connecting more services. The CASH platform is essentially a connecting point between multiple services. Email lists syncing to MailChimp, paid downloads connecting Paypal and S3, etc. Extending those connections so people can push offers into services like Rhapsody or Beats, adding new payment providers, and even easily (read: no code) connecting services like Twilio and others open up the possibilities immensely.
We've always prioritized flexibility and full control over layout. (Sometimes to a fault.) Customization is vital and the more an artist site can mirror the art or the audience the better. For us a lot of this means digging into the potential of cashmusic.js and expanding it where need be. What other ways can we find to customize common services?