OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

Musicollaborate.com: online music collaboration community

hugeknot — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:37:17 +0000

The online music collaboration community at http://musicollaborate.com/ is a resource for songwriters and musicians to come together online.

Start a Project Group and collaborate on audio projects.

www.myblogband.com - a networking site for musicians to create a band and collaborate through the web

powerinthelines — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:48:48 +0000

On www.myblogband.com, musicians collaborate online through the global workspace of a band. Start a band or audition for one. Search musicians across the country and the globe. Upload, download, rework and repost tracks. It's free to listen and download other people's music also!
www.myblogband.com

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

Web engineer for next step in live entertainment | DeepRockDrive

jon@drupal.org — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:34:21 +0000

DeepRockDrive, an innovative interactive entertainment property on the Web (music, not porn!) based in Redmond, WA and Las Vegas, NV is about to go live with one of the most exciting advancements in live entertainment in recent history. By blending the excitement of live music performance with the interactivity afforded by excellent Web 2.0 social software, we will give artists and fans new tools and a new community in which to interact together. It will culminate with live, interactive performances that set a new bar for fan and artist interaction. But we need your help.

We are looking for skilled, professional, experienced software engineers to join our team to help us realize our vision. Our team is passionate, focused, professional and laughs a lot together. We value diverse perspectives and place a strong emphasis on the team's ability to deliver a world-class, first of its kind system.

We desire expert Web developers ( LAMP or WAMP or MAMP ), with proven strength in PHP, MySQL, Facebook API, and ideally Drupal (though the latter can be learned in realtime if your PHP skills are razor-sharp). Ruby on Rails development and deployment a plus!

Qualified candidates will have 5 or more years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 years of experience with enterprise-class web applications and 2 or more years of experience implementing social software systems in PHP, CSS and JavaScript. Our ideal candidates also have passion for social software and for the music performance world. Candidates need to have participated in the implementation and deployment of an enterprise class web system that has reached significant scale. References will be verified.

The position is based in Redmond, Washington, and provides significant opportunity for flexible work environment and hours outside regular face-to-face team meetings in our Redmond offices.

Our competitive salary will depend upon experience, and additional benefits will include company ownership opportunity, complete medical and dental benefits. DeepRockDrive is a well-funded company that is far along in its development.

If you meet all of the above qualifications, please send a text, Microsoft Word, or HTML resume to jobs@deeprockdrive.com.

Note that telecommuting is marked as "not allowed", meaning candidates should be local to the Seattle/King County area, but in-office requirements are quite flexible.

Seattle

OpenMusic: Uniting networks with content aggregation and distributed authentication

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:22:16 +0000

The main idea here is simple:

Unified music charts

All websites build upon the OpenMusic installation profile share one common music chart. Statistics on how many times a Websong or WebLP has been played/downloaded/purchased will be common to all OpenMusic websites. Benefits are apparent: Recognition beyond the boundaries of a single OpenMusic website, promotion and cross-pollination of fans between websites that belong to the OpenMusic network.

Distributed authentication

This has been core functionality in Drupal since ages. With the arrival of OpenID in core though things have slightly changed. So has my perception on how distributed authentication should be implemented in OpenMusic.

Drupal modules

It is hard to tell yet, openID, a variant of drupal.module or something else altogether new perhaps would provide us with distributed authentication. As far as music charts are concerned, as of now I haven't thought of something that could work out of the box. Apparently a central charts server will be required unless a different approach is taken eg charts built by aggregation.

Matters to discuss

Obviously when music charts are affected by many different sources, the factor of error or misuse has to be taken into consideration. What if someone purposely builds an openmusic website only to feed the charts with fake sales?

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: ad revenue, user recompensation and owner benefits

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:18:55 +0000

awaiting completion

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: the OpenMusic theme and user personalized themes

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:18:36 +0000

awaiting completion

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: promoting the work of music artists

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:18:03 +0000

awaiting completion

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: tools for music artists

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:17:31 +0000

awaiting completion

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: copyright management

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:16:01 +0000

awaiting completion

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: WebLP - redefining the way music is sold

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:15:10 +0000

Introduction

Now that is a bold statement so I'll try my best to justify it.
OpenMusic should hopefully be the next step in music networks in the sense that it glues things and notions already scattered elsewhere into an integrated music solution, that should eventually comprise a big cohesive network with a potential for redefining common concepts, one of which is the way music is being distributed. It sounds too grandiose, but I say we should aim at the mountain to hit the lake, aim at the moon to hit the mountain, or aim at Mars to hit the stars.

Existing ways to sell music

In the apparent demise of the CD-selling music industry and it's current loss of orientation, music artists, and I am here as a musician too, therefore we, are free to adopt whatever new-born technology is promising to deliver our music to a wider audience - and as the myspace phenomenon suggests - regardless of whether we make any money directly out of it.
This situation introduces a fundamental problem. Do we really need to sell our music or not? Should people pay for it or be labeled as pirates for downloading it for free? The world is left disorientated. At itune you get exactly what you get at emule - a file. The only difference is that on one hand you are legal, on the other you are guilty. In essence you are paying for something that has more to do with moral issues than with art.

Taking a glimpse at the past, music was distributed as a bundle of art, consisting of more than just songs, making for a collection of side-art called the record sleeve. People were used to paying for this supplementary art, everything worked well and millions of artists paid their rent by producing art to enrich the music product before it hit the stores. What people buy right now in the music stores of the future is but a shadow of what they used to get, what music used to be.

The present state is - I presume ( and hope ) - a temporary state, the quiet before the storm, as the web centric convergence of media is going to bring about a great deal of a storm, I believe. Now is a chance to embrace innovation and let Drupal introduce the world to a new means for music distribution that acknowledges the past and uses it to shape the future.

Websong and WebLP

Websong: a audio node (audio.module) that contains an audio file that can be downloaded or streamed for free by everybody. It imposes no limitations to the quality of the recording whatsoever. It is not a demo version of the original music, it is the real thing, but free.
WebLP a node that has websongs attached to it (audio_attach.module?), together with an extended set of complimentary media (), making for a virtual record sleeve for our digital LP. These media consist of:

websongs revisions: each websong can hold a chain of revisions for the song it contains. This way the artist is not tied to a definite, final version of his song, but can publish differently orchestrated versions of his songs whenever he choses to release them. On a parallel note, versioning provides added value to the WebLP, since it constantly adds updated content to it.
photos
interviews of the band
drawings
music videos
short films
in general, fan crew submitted content

Selling access

A WebLP is dissimilar to the current music products, both physical and digital in the sense that it is a an active place in the web, it is not a file, neither a set of files that can be downloaded. It doesn't make any sense to download a set of files that are being constantly updated, and it's not only the songs that can be updated. A user is granted access to a WebLP by purchasing an access code. Access codes are easily marketable products, can lead to many interesting product combinations and they are hard to pirate - one can easily spot an access code that is being used by many different users.

The circle is complete

The WebLP intends to unite artists and fans in a circle where offer meets demand. OpenMusic provides the structure for artists to ask for content (fan crews) and for fans to generate it. Fans are rewarded with recognition (they become members of the artist's fan crew with elevated access rights) and artists have a means to add value to their WebLP without any actual cost.

Drupal Modules

So far I haven't got my hands on implementing a WebLP , therefore I cannot be clear on that part. Certainly for such advanced functionality I think we will need the bigger part of the ecommerce module, where parcel.module comes to mind when talking about combining nodes in a sell-able product. With audio.module things looked tougher, last time I checked it (June 2007) it was being reorganized into sub modules. It is a bit difficult to keep an eye on it, however I'll be trying both modules within this month in my sandbox.

Issues to be discussed

A lot apparently! First of all I would like your opinion on the term "WebLP". How does it sound? Do you have any other suggestions?

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: connecting music artists and fans

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:14:32 +0000

Relative data structures

To begin with, the main idea here is:

All users have a singular userprofile nodeprofile node, that holds their profile information.
All artists have a singular artistprofile nodeprofile node that simultaneously is an organic group node. This gives the ability to each artist to hold subscribers. More about that later!
Each music band is also an organic group node holding subscribers.

more information about profile information in OpenMusic can be found at OpenMusic: user registration & profile information

Why should bands and artists be organic groups instead of simple users, and why do they need subscribers?
Well, I began by thinking about how bands are implemented in social networks such as myspace. Each band is in essence a user, solely responsible for managing the web area of the band, having all the rights to create/edit content. Should another trusted person be called to administer the band’s pages, he needs to be given all login information.
Setting aside the fact that this creates serious security and trust issues, let’s consider the fact that bands are not themselves persons, they are groups of people – consisting of single persons. New people join them, existing people leave them. They should be treated as such in their digital manifestation, if that makes any sense.

Moving on to Drupal’s implementation of user groups – organic groups, and my take on how bands and artists should be realized in OpenMusic, bands as organic groups can hold subscribers. Let’s call these subscribers fans. Fans can be given access control to either view or create/edit content belonging to the organic group, in essence opening the door to unprecedented freedom for collaboration between bands and fans as I will explain later on. Now comes the interesting part. Categorizing fans not by taxonomy but by access roles, allows the organic group creator to give real roles to his band’s subscribers (e.g. bandmanager, bandmember, graphicartist, photographer, videoartist) in reality giving them rights to create/edit specific content depending on the role they have.

An example: Suppose we have a bunch of content types for our band-organic groups: audio nodes, image nodes, event nodes etc. If we create three access roles for example, one for each content type, say:

band_member - can create and edit own audio nodes in the organic group
band_graphic_artist - can create and edit own image nodes and
band_manager - can create and edit own event nodes

and give out these roles to respective subscribers, we have in essence provided a means for our fans to take on a role in the band “business”. Fans that have no role in the organic group are simply fans, while the rest are people that the band needs to carry out tasks. Their access role defines their real role in the band business. In a further update we will be talking about what roles fans can and should be able to take.

To summarize, until now I’ve explained why bands should be implemented as organic groups and what functionality we gain by doing so. But why should fans be involved in the band business, why would they, and what do we gain by following that practice? Truth is, I have seen fans setting aside their rent paying job to come and help the band stick posters, design the website, administer myspace, setup gigs and give them clothing/haircut advice or even go shopping with them. Imagine all that organized by a layer of band-control, using OpenMusic as the command center. Things that should be done by the Recording companies - at a price of course – OpenMusic helps bands get them for free. But why would fans want to get involved in all that? Because this is a way to pay back for what bands give to the people - Music. It’s a new way of paying for music, and if we agree with the prediction that one day music will be free and musicians will only earn money from concerts, this is perhaps a viable alternative way to be paid something back instead of nothing. It is barter exchange for music, a call to consciousness for paying back with service instead of money. And we can all spare some free time for our favorite band.

Fan Crew roles

Hereby follows an early list of roles to be assigned to organic group subscribers. Most propositions are not self explanatory, I hope this will be fixed soon.

Music and recording

music composer

lyricist

sound engineer

openstudio mentor

rehearsal administrator

Management and promotion

artist/band manager

advertiser

social network editor

radio/tv ambassador

live concert ambassador

street team zealot

Creative and image

graphic/web artist

copy editor

video artist

photographer

clothing consultant

haircut consultant

Issues to be discussed

The pitfalls of getting fans to band business

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

OpenMusic: user registration & profile information

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:06:14 +0000

User registration is one of the elements that greatly affect a web site's user base. Having a lengthy, indiscreet registration form thrown into our user's face right in front of the door foreshadows an even worst experience when registered. Social networks need to get indiscreet by asking all of these personal questions, but it is safer to do so when they have a firm hold on the user and that is when the user passes through registration(we've got his email!).

With that being said, user registration needs to be short and user-friendly while it collects all the crucial information we need. There are many scenarios we can go by, and many modules we can choose to make our job easier -> which is to collect the information we need: (the following lists will be updated as we go)

Modules

nodeprofile:profiles are nodes so that we can use cck and views

cck

pageroute

rolesignup: select a role upon registration ( we will be discussing about why that is necessary )

Registration scenarios

The user selects a role (artist of fan or whatever- with the rolesignup.module) then goes through the standard Drupal registration, and then upon the first login he is forwarded to a pageroute to fill in his nodeprofile, compulsory to complete or not.

Integrate nodeprofile with normal Drupal user registration so that the user creates his username and password and fills in his profile information at the same page.

The user registers normally, logins and he is prompted to fill in his profile information with some form of an alert. This leads him to a pageroute, compulsory or not( as you may have guessed, I love pageroutes!)

User information gathered in nodeprofiles

Nodeprofile common for artists/non-artists

name and surname

age

birthday

gender

country

hometown

Nodeprofile only for artists.
in essence this nodeprofile is mostly needed because it will be made into our artists' organic group, therefore filling it automagically creates the artists' organic group.

instruments I play

music education

Nodeprofile Content types:

Userprofile:all users –artists/non-artists alike- have a userprofile nodeprofile. This node type contains cck fields and taxonomy associations that describe general profile information, classifying users and making them searchable.

Artistprofile: only users that are assigned the role “artist” during registration (role_signup.module) will create an artistprofile nodeprofile node.This node holds information relative to the artist’s musical activities and properties.

Issues to be discussed

OpenID, core in Drupal 6 (thanks Dub), probably used in OpenMusic, how does it affect the registration procedure?

which of the nodeprofile information fields should be made taxonomy, and which module best inserts taxonomy into a cck field

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities

Outlining the features of OpenMusic

christopher_skauss@drupal.org — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:15:21 +0000

Welcome everybody!
In this first post and the subsequent ones I would like to provide an outline for the basic features of the OpenMusic network, the ones that I already have in mind and the ones that are yet to come. Each feature will be briefly summarized here while all discussion will be taking place in feature specific posts.
Thank you for your interest!

OpenMusic-a network of Drupal based social music communities