Iron & Wine, Wild Flag, Portugal. The Man team up with non-profit CASH Music

Article Contributed by four paws media | Published on Monday, September 26, 2011

CASH Music is a nonprofit organization that builds open source digital tools for musicians and labels.They've been hard at work doing this virtually unfunded for the past four years working with over 100 different artists, labels, and management companies on various projects built to spec. They are now building an easy to use platform featuring their more popular tools built to date including, but not limited to, download codes, email collection, paid downloads, and secure streams. The platform will be completely free and available for all AND simple enough for even the most non-technical people to install and use. This finished platform will be ready for release in mid November.

In the meantime, CASH has been doing weekly releases of the platform with new additions, documentation, and demos. For every major element added there is a demo showing how a real, working band has actually utilized the tools. The email collection demo release shows two different ways that the code can be utilized. A Portugal. The Man microsite highlights a download of the track "When the War Ends" from their American Ghetto album in exchange for an email address using the basic email collection code. Iron & Wine's demo shows that with just a little JavaScript they could easily enable an email contest for tickets. Fans got to choose one of three shows in the Pacific NW that they were interested in receiving a guest list spot to and were entered to win in exchange for their email address.

This week's demo features Merge Records' supergroup Wild Flag showing off the tour date element, powering upcoming dates on their site and in a downloadable code demo.

CASH Music believes that the voice of the artist has, to date, mostly been missing in the tech sector of the music business. To help fix this they are building up a membership of artists, indie labels, and management companies that they are looking to for feedback, guidance, and input. Membership is free and growing every week.

To date it includes:

Brendan Benson

Boy & Bear

Kim Boekbinder

Calexico

Chinese Stars

Clogs

Jonathan Coulton

Family of the Year

The Frames

The Go! Team

Rebecca Gates