I’ve just been sitting here the last 3 days tightening up the ccHost Query API 2.0, getting it ready for wide public release. As of this writing about 85% of ccMixter is driven by the API and I figure if we’re going to integrate into social sites to spread the good word I need to make it “real” - that is, robust, by actually checking parameters and returning meaningful error messages and other boring and friendly geeky things.

What a coincidence, here comes the last.fm API.

There’s no point in comparing the two, the ccH QAPI is a really basic affair with simply a view on looking at the data. To be honest, it’s mainly about making my life easier by having a uniform programming model to add features into ccMixter.

The last.fm API is really about Big Game.

A quick jargon lesson: When a programmer writes the code that makes up a software application it is not done in a vacuum. They are instructing some piece(s) of hardware to act a certain way. The problem is, there are thousands of different pieces of hardware and their instruction sets are all randomly different. So along comes a guy or company or a group of gun-toting Libertarians open-source movement, somebody to relieve that pain who says “I’ll make it so you don’t have to worry about the hardware. I’ll do this by writing a piece of software that goes between your application and the hardware. You just (re)write your application to a new instruction set that I give you and I’ll take care of the rest.” So you forget about the hardware’s instruction set and invest time, energy and money in learning this other guy’s instructions that he calls an “operating system.” Things are going OK except that all your friends are driving faster cars and even faster women and seem flush with the green. You figure out they’re having the bling life because all their applications are on this whole other operating system. Now along comes another set of bozos that say “Forget about all those operating systems. We’ll make it so you don’t you don’t have to worry about that stuff. You just (re)write your application to a new instruction we give you and we’ll take make sure it runs on all those operating systems.” So now you embark on re-investing your time, energy and money in learning this whole other thing and now you’re good to go with what these guys call an “application stack” - yes, as in stack of trays like in a cafeteria. You only worry about your “food” (aka script) on the top tray and the forget about the rest of the trays.

No matter whether the instruction set you use is meant to obscure hardware differences or operating differences or networking protocol differences the concept is called a “platform.”

Targeting a specific platform can be tricky because when you commit to one of these you become dependent on it until it is more cost efficient to rewrite the thing yet again. So at some point you are make the critical decision to pick which platform you are going to take to the dance. If enough application developers pick the same platform then the folks that provided that platform are the Big Winners.

The Web changed the game a bunch but there’ll always be a group of folks who want to be the Grand Gate Keepers and Key Masters. They stock their cubicles with developers who love to invent APIs and platforms because it’s just plain fun. When facebook invented their own platform and the site exploded because of all the cool platform widgets that developers wrote (typical facebook widget guy can pull down $2k per widget which is about a two day job) and birds were singing again. Except at Google which is so big they share mini-APIs out of strategic good will more than anything else. They don’t need to share their actual platform so much, just the applications.

I’ve forgotten where I’m going with this other than to say I hope it’s somebody else who goes and builds the last.fm/ccMixer widget and it isn’t left to me.

Some days you eat the bear…

Kristin says: “CC is good because…” someone used her song to a cool video. Once you get that first taste of auto-collab….

ficbot at “The Best Media in Life is Free” says: “ccMixter to the rescue…” because he gets to use open music in a slide presentation. …you keep coming back for more.

LA Times says: “Intellectual property law is supposed to balance public and private interests — a feature that Congress often forgets when responding to copyright holders.” Who knew anyone left in Hollywood actually feels this way?

But seriously and on a more positive note…

Lucas’ conversation brings up the idea of the collective (A. K. A. musicians’ community sites, net labels, etc.) acting as the new version of a recording label. Not a full replacement in terms of what a label does today, like Amazon replacing brick and mortar book stores, but more like blogging, which has parallels in the pre-Web world but is a service industry born of the Web itself.

The musicians’ collective and it’s implications, commercially and otherwise, are not new ideas to me. After all, I run one for Creative Commons called ccMixter. Unfortunately with the confidential nature of the way the ccMixter RFP was held under wraps for 18 months I chose the better part of valor (for once) and did not discuss these things in public because I was scared out of my mind that CC’s tax exempt status could be hurt if the ccM hand-over was screwed up. This, of course, turned out to be one lawyer’s opinion but it was the only information I had at the time.

The business opportunity implications lurking around ccM would take more than a blog post to relay but here’s one highlight that makes the ccM collective even more interesting than other sites that pool album shopping carts and other resources.

Lucas and Neeru’s original vision for the site was a re-use model obvious to them, new to musicians. They saw the site laid out as:

a) source material
b) remixes
c) recursion

From day one of my involvement I felt that with a few additions (e.g. giving a cappellas a top-tier status, creating a Sample Pool larger than just the one site, focusing on quality via the Editors’ Picks) that we could help propel the concepts into a model musicians could wrap their heads around. This combined vision has given ccM a unique process for creating really good music that, like blogging, has parallels in the pre-Web days but has grown into something different.

Somehow, unlike hiring a producer (A.K.A. your boyfriend) to create an album based on a singer/songwriter’s material and unlike collaborating with other band members to jam together until a vocal and instrumental work as a unit, the act of tossing things into a sample pool with no fixed objective or assignments has yielded some fantastic music. When I say “no fixed objective” I mean we even stopped having remix contests over a year ago and the music only got better. It got better because the thing drawing in better singers was better producers. And the thing drawing in better producers was better singers. There’s the recursion thing writ large in real terms.

fwiw I walk around these days thinking “I can’t believe it fucking worked!” because maybe Lucas and Neeru and folks at CC are used to having their visions pan out in the real world but this is new to me. I tried for years to convince singers and musicians that open music was good for their careers and the world and exposure through sharing was the sane route, not the inverted distortion field of handing over 100% of your rights to a huge corporation in return for financial debt you can never repay. Of course, all of those are still true and certainly part of the attraction, but it wasn’t until this recursion-in-the-pool thing starting taking off that all of a sudden the best musicians I know are forking over stems and pells without blinking. I look up now and I realize in two years I’ve gone from nearly full-time evangelism to nearly none.

Now, maybe the CD is dead. Maybe a ccM model isn’t amenable to selling songs at $0.99 a pop.

But how could this thing not be marketable? Especially if we’re talking about, like blogging, a new type of service, born of the Web. Assuming all the other fundamentals of business skills are in place (clever marketing, good people connections, profit oriented bookkeeping, etc.) I would say it’s worth a shot to go after the huge B2B music consuming marketplace.

In “mo better label“, Lucas has a very nice conversation going (I’ll be using that as a spring board for other posts in a bit) but he goes off the rails suggesting that EMI grabs ccMixter. ;)

Actually that would be a brilliant move for EMI, pretty terrible for ccMixter and inconceivable for me to trust an organization like that to be my employer or guardian of the site. That suggestion reminds me of calls for Microsoft to fully embrace the open/free source world. As far as I know they still don’t believe in the Internet over there. They sure didn’t when I left seven years ago and several key executives expressed hopes that it literally go away, like floppy drives or dialup modems. I suspect, like many major media companies, they are basically hanging out waiting for next best thing — the end of net neutrality. At that point they can choke down the pipeline and use http for what God intended: paid everything. And by “hanging out” I mean buying politicians, spreading cash around to mega-sites and other lower hanging fruit.

After a very long time talking about it both privately and publicly, the ccMixter Request for Proposals is now a real and public thing. This is the first juncture at which I am being allowed to publicly address it in any meaningful way and I will do that in the near future.

[UPDATE] I’ve posted my thoughts on the RFP at

“My Views on the RFP and the Future of ccM…“

Niels (aka spinmeister) at eMXR is a real sweet guy who has turned out to be a great resource at ccMixter bringing hoards of great musicians to the site, doing great interviews with Trifonicand Calendar Girl and posting some superb mixes. Probably the most important thing he brings to the site is his inviting charm and grace. This is good for any community site, but especially ccM because for whatever else I do for the site, this is one area where I need others to pick up my slack.

This feature of his is in full view in a longish conversation we had in which we covered everything fourstones and ccMixter. I managed to keep it together and got ranty (moi??) only at the very end.

The full transcript is here:

eMXR: Fourstones of Magnatune and ccMixter fame gives rare interview

Justin Davidson is writer with Newsday and as of late New York Magazine. He interviewed me in a phoner a year ago and I wasn’t sure what, if anything he had done with it. While searching for Magnatune stuff today I tripped over it on his blog that he shares with Alex Ross, author of the very cool The Rest is Noise.

Of couse the interview was done long before I knew about “Noise” and the connection between the two (”omg, he’s that guy”) was a real treat ;) The next time our paths cross I’ll be sure to suggest one of them writes his next book about the open music movement. If he puts me at the center of it, he can call it “The Rest is Nose.”

I don’t claim the right to pontificate but if you indulge me I will. It’s in that spirit that I share my evolving thoughts on the open music scene because I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I’ve been led to notice a potentially large shift in open music. This shift seems to be inspired by the You-ification of the Web (see Time Person of the Year for the mainstream media’s interpretation).

Professor Lessig’s talk in Germany last week discusses the dearth (if not death) of the participatory aspect of music forecast by J. P. Sousa (the guy who wrote the theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus) at the turn of the 20th century and facilitated by the industrialization and commidization of music. The introduction of technology such as the phonograph and radio was a fundamental shift in way humans thought about music — the idea of music had suddenly shifted after tens of thousands of years from participation to mass consumption. Note that we are talking about very recent events. I doubt either the term ‘music business’ or ‘music industry’ were in wide use when my father was born in 1916.

While Professor Lessig is careful not to predict or even express a desire to return to a participatory era I can’t help thinking that sites like Splice Music and Jam Glue, by capitalizing on Flash ™ plus broadband ubiquity, reverberate with echoes of the pre-phonograph era. Instead of sitting around the parlor piano or on the porch with a banjo, jug and washboard, the modern day “musician” is parked in the campus cafeteria with a wireless laptop and headphones using audio samples (made by folks they’ve never met and know nothing about) into their own creative works and by default posting the results back into the community. Of course the result is, in turn, available for reuse both others.

I put the word musician in quotes above because the people participating at these sites do not meet our definition of the term in the post industrial sense. We’ve come to think of musicians as people who take lessons, own an instrument, spent money on (or stole) music software or a DJ mixer and turntable. But I suspect that a lot of the people congregating at Jam Glue and Splice Music do not have any those materials or have invested any money or time in activity we used to call ‘playing music.’ At the very least these sites make this scenario possible and I guarantee these sites pitched their investors on the hopes of attracting people exactly in that category.

At this point it is worth mentioning (and to slide in a plug of my benefactors) Flash and broadband are not the only tools that make these community online remix sites possible. They both heavily rely on Creative Commons licenses to free everybody involved from the nightmare that is ‘fair use’ and other irrelevant legal instruments. (To be honest I just take that for granted at this point because I don’t know of a music site that has started up in the last year or two that doesn’t employ CC. So we are all benefactors from a really wonderful idea.)

On the other side of the open music world, we have Magnatune. The key to their success has been the discretion involved in hand picking a tiny fraction of the the submissions. The result is a far cry from Splice Music and Jam Glue where the emphasis is on the righteous goals of spreading community and commodization of the tools, not necessarily a source of reliably world-class quality music.

Having laid out this landscape I’ll say loudly it is very important that commodity remix sites exists and I’m grateful for CC making them possible. I would love to see a world where everybody tries their hand at music and remixing samples in a Flash web page is a glorious way to get that to happen. But that alone is not what gets me up in the morning and it’s not why I wanted to get involved with CC and the open music movement.

My focus has been and will continue to be to enable folks who have the right combination of talent, passion and discipline to make a living making music, because for some reason we’ve all accepted it is impossible to do so without selling your soul for the chance.

I take it for granted that anybody who wants to make and share music for fun and community (you know, cultcha stuff) will find ways in the next 100 years to readily do so. What I’m waiting for is a community of CC musicians to quit their day jobs because they are each making $40,000 a year in online sales and licensing. (Group health insurance to come in phase two.)

I believe there is a viable argument to make that the participatory You-culture and Magnatune style sharing ecomony are not mutually exclusive. And perhaps ccMixter is the start of the thing that sits in the middle. A hybrid, or more precisely a bridge: A community site where quality is emphasized. Two shining examples of the results are the Lisa remix album and Colin’s PreMixed. Both of these represent what can happen when a community of quality musicians hang out and trade talents.

I could easily imagine the site following the Motown model. In the early 1960’s Barry Gordy conceived of a music label that worked like a movie studio in which a pool of songwriters, producers, studio musicians and performers all used each other’s services producing only winning combinations. In an even more organic way, the ccM community has proven, without a doubt, that by emphasizing a cappellas by talented singers and songwriters, we have attracted some of the best producer talents on the Web, which, in turn, attract great singers, on and on. producing some great, some would say winning combinations. All of which feeds the reputation of the site as being a reliable source of good music.

At ccM we have always emphasized quality over quantity and that, like Magnatune, combined with the openness of a community oriented site will be the key to the success moving forward.

Professor Lawrence (Larry) Lessig a good friend of ccMixter (maybe the best friend we’ve ever had ;)) has announced that he is handing over the reigns of CEO of CC.

The cool side of this is that the new CEO is Joi Ito a very good friend indeed ;)

Having Joi at the helm, along with new board member John Buckman on the board makes it feel like mixter is surrounded by good friends.

I’m told the change will have little to zero affect on mixter and for some unexplained reason I actually kind of buy it.

The new ccMixter Christopher Willits / “Colors Shifting” Remix Contest is officially under way and taking remixes. It bugs me just a little that as an indie artist he doesn’t have any music (before this) under CC on the web but the sources are so amazing I can’t wait to hear the entries.