Maggie Vail and Jesse von Doom are the co-executive directors of CASH Music (Coalition of Artists and Stakeholders) a non-profit organization that brings an open-source approach to music distribution and production. CASH focuses on educating around those ideas through online resources, stakeholder events, and face-to-face workshops, as well as offering a software platform.

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Show notes

Maggie mentioned two early groups that helped independent artists and labels handle digital distribution: the for-profit Merlin and the trade group A2im. Maggie worked with bands at Kill Rock Stars for 17 years before becoming the co-head of CASH.

Jonathan Coulton is on CASH's board, and I spoke to him about his career in "Baby Got Back Catalog," March 2013. Back in 2000, Courtney Love explained how the sausage of music-industry accounting in big labels is designed to rip off artists.

I visited the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in 2012, and wrote "magazine.org/4/the-sound-of-silence">The Sound of Silence" for The Magazine about the issues of preservation and rights. Pandora has a good explanation of how music rights have to be licensed in America.

Jesse received a fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation, which has freed them a bit from the endlessly cycle of fundraising to move forward and grow the staff. Dan Sinker is in charge of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project for the Mozilla Foundation, and the founder of Punk Planet, an underground culture magazine.