(updated: Added ‘Audio’ screenshot)

Not, unfortunately, mostly with Dbasr. Real-life intruded this week; namely, the need to pay bills. So I spent most of the week working on outside projects.

However, good news: I’ve got the Post page mostly working. Adding/editing posts is now doable in Dbasr! You can’t post to Facebook/MySpace/Twitter yet, and I’m still working on the Media Manager (that allows you to insert media into a Post), but the basic functionality works.

This week, I still want to get three more pages fully functional. I should be able to manage that.

So somebody’s making money there. Just not, y’know, the people who created the content that’s being torrented in the first place.

Which makes it a little disingenuous when self-proclaimed “pirates” start cloaking themselves in the whole “information wants to be free” bit.

Tell it to your advertisers, dick.

WordPress is a blogging engine. It’s designed to allow users to publish, manage and edit blog entries and static pages, which consist mostly of straight HTML text. It can be extended — as Peter Kirn pointed out to me in an email — using custom fields for posts and pages.

It would be possible, in theory, to simply extend WordPress using custom fields and some database hacking to do what Dbasr does. You could build in tagging for audio, video, etc.

But I think the result would be clumsy, cumbersome and more than a bit labyrinthine. You’d have to not only add a whole set of custom fields, you’d have to rewrite the admin UI, strip out a lot of the extraneous stuff, and build specific themes that would work with the new data sets. Essentially, I think, you’d be doing as much work to create a Dbasr-type CMS with WordPress that it’s simply easier to write Dbasr instead.

What would be the benefit of using WordPress as the base for Dbasr? Well, for one thing, at the moment, WordPress has several million more existing users than Dbasr does. (Dbasr has one real-world user — me.) For another, there are thousands of WordPress developers out there. The key is in numbers.

But I think the problems outweigh the benefits. Dbasr is designed from the ground up to do what it does. It’s not intended to be a replacement for WordPress — if what you want to have is a blog, WordPress is the tool for doing that. It’s an entirely different approach to content management for an entirely different set of needs. Blogging is part of it, but Dbasr’s blogging tools are far simpler and less feature-heavy than WordPress’s. But its media management tools are far more rich and capable. (That’s not a slight on WordPress. It doesn’t need to do heavy media lifting.)

One of Dbasr’s features will be the ability to import, export and cross-post to WordPress. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, you’ll be able to import your existing posts from it into your Dbasr site. You can export Dbasr posts to WordPress. And if you’re running both Dbasr and WordPress, you’ll be able to post to the WordPress site from Dbasr using WordPress’s post-by-API functionality. You’ll also be able to post to your Dbasr installation from any tool that supports the standard WordPress API for posting.

As I told Peter, I think all of this will make more sense when you start actually seeing the tools in action. Which hopefully will be soon — I’m hoping by the end of the week to have working screenshots.

So…what’s new? We’ve raised $430 our first week; not as much as I’d like, but a promising start. We’ve also got two lovely people volunteering to help with the coding! I’m currently trying to document what I’ve got so far and get them up to speed and figure out where their strengths and interests are; more on that to come.

I rewrote Dbasr’s data classes entirely. There’s an abstract class called “Item” and every other class is a child of that. “Item” has one static property — a table name in the database — and each child class updates that property to suit whatever table is associated with that class. When an object is instantiated — like a new Post — it simply retrieves a row from the associated table and populates its property table with each item from that row; the related property name comes from the associated column name.

What does that mean? Well, it means, for example, that whenever you create a new Post object and give it the id of a post in the database, it goes and gets the structure of that table, which might look like this:

• id
• title
• slug
• body
• category
• tag
• status
• user
• dateAdded

And then it gets the right data for each of these, and creates a Post object that has properties id, title, slug, body, etc. Each class is also extended to have a couple of other properties; for example, the “category” for each post is a numeric ID for that category, but when a Post is created, the class also retrieves the name of the post’s category, for ease of use, and dumps it into a property called “categoryName”.

This is much cleaner than the way I was doing it before, where every class had a custom construct. Whenever I changed anything around in the database, I had to make sure to update the associated class; now the class just works with what it’s given, not what it was expecting.

It also reduced the size of the class file from several thousand lines of code to 282. Which is rad.

(I’m a big believer in elegance in code architecture. If I can’t look at my code and figure out how it works, nobody who wants to tinker with it will be able to, either.)

I haven’t added all the classes yet, because I’m still working out the database structure for things like the store, but I’ve got 90% of it done. And having classes to work from is probably seriously 30-40% of the entire Dbasr functionality; most of the eventual template tags will simply be calls to retrieve class properties.

So that’s cool.

I’ve also been wireframing the admin pages. As I mentioned, I’m aiming towards minimalism in the design of the admin section, partially out of my own tastes and partially because Dbasr is meant to be non-intimidating to the casual user. My experience and anecdotal evidence suggests that non-technical users are often frightened by their first look at the WordPress dashboard. (Never mind things like Joomla or Drupal, which resemble the instrument panel of a fighter jet.)

So rather than putting every single admin page into the main sidebar menu, I’m going to put just the categories — Posts, Events, Media, etc. Click on ‘Posts’ and you’ll see a list of posts and a ‘New Post’ button. There’ll also be quick links on the main admin dashboard page.

I’m not 100% sure on this, but I’m going to start that way and do usability testing.

So what’s next? Building the admin control panels, really. When that’s done we’re 60% of the way finished with Dbasr. That said, this is the most daunting process and the one I’ve spent more time attacking in bad, useless, needlessly complex ways for the past couple of years. I’m really trying to pare each admin page down to its most simplistic possible layout. I’m going to split each page into a “basic” and “advanced” section. So if you want to just put up a quick event, you’ll have the basic input elements — venue, date/time, location, etc. But if you click on the ‘advanced’ twisty, you’ll see the option to add media or images to the event, add custom tags, etc.

What do you think? Is this a good way of organizing this stuff?

So expect musings on control panel design this week. My goal is to have at least three of the pages finished and working, if not styled, by next week’s status report, and at least a working prototype of the UI.

Onward and upward!

I’ve been saying for a while that the more popular a band is, the less likely they are to sell records now. Why? Because more people want and have their work and are willing to share/seed/pirate it. I’ve said that less popular bands will sell more records because it’s easier to just go to their (hopefully soon Dbasr) site and buy the music than try to find it on the Pirate Bay or some other torrent site.

But I was thinking about this the wrong way. It’s not about actual sales numbers; it’s about sales-to-shared ratios. (Or sales-to-pirated, if that’s the way you think.) The more popular a band is, the lower the sales-to-shares ratio; less people are buying, more people are sharing. But a really popular band with a low s2s ratio will still move more actual units than an obscure band with a high s2s ratio.

For example, think of Justin Bieber. (God help you.) Let’s say the grand total of Justin Bieber album transactions — where a person obtains a Justin Bieber record, whether they pay for it or torrent it or what-have-you — in a week is 100,000 copies.

Now, let’s assume a 1:9 s2s ratio; for every 100,000 records Justin Bieber sells, 90,000 of those are shared/pirated, and 1,000 of them are actual sales.

Now, let’s look at, I dunno, Big Friendly Corporation. BFC might move 200 albums a week. (I would actually love to see that; go buy their record right now!) Their s2s ratio is much higher, because you can’t get BFC records easily from torrent sites. Let’s say it’s 8:2; for every 40 records that are pirated, 160 are sold.

Those are encouraging numbers, but the fact is that Justin Bieber still makes assloads more money from record sales than BFC does, because the actual volume is so much higher that even a tiny fraction of sales versus shares is still a substantial amount of money. If albums are selling for $10 each, Justin just made $10K to Big Friendly’s $1600.

So far, so good. But — and here’s the thing I realized — there’s a point somewhere in the middle, not easily quantifiable, where a band is selling enough records to make reasonable money but not popular enough that they’re losing sales to piracy.

Let’s pick a band like Dusty Rhodes & The River Band, who are equally awesome to the BFC but who tour a lot more and have a bigger audience. DR&TRB sell their album through their website, or have it available through iTunes, etc. (I assume they do, this is hypothetical).

They’re right in that sweet spot; if they play 5 shows a week and 100 people from each show want to obtain the record, that’s 500 record obtainers. But since it’s hard to find DR&TRB’s stuff on the Pirate Bay, they’ll have a 9:1 ratio. They’re selling 450 records a week. At $10, that’s $4500 a week in sales — not Justin Bieber, but respectable.

I’m making these numbers up, but you see my point — somewhere in the middle of obscurity and megastardom, there’s probably still a point where bands can make money because purchasing their album is still easier than pirating it.

I don’t think bands will ever make the kind of money they did pre-Napster, though that’s an entirely different subject. But I do think they can make some money — maybe enough to make the effort and cost of recording worthwhile.

Now, if they only had a tool for doing so…

Building a plugin-capable CMS is hard. Really hard. Part of the reason I haven’t actually launched Dbasr is because, for a year or so, I was trying to build it with the assumption that it would have plugin capability. It defeated my brain.

Ultimately, I think it’s necessary, of course. But I’d also like to launch 1.0 and see where the desire paths lie.

How? Kunaki. Kunaki makes CDs with full color two-panel inserts (i.e. a single insert page, front and back) and a back tray card in a jewel case and DVDs with a color cover in a DVD case, wrapped in cellophane, for $1.00 each. (More for volumes of 11 or more, oddly enough.)

To sell media through Kunaki, you create an account with them, download their (sadly Windows-only) software, create your CD or DVD, and upload it to them. Once you do this, you’ll be able to add the item to your Dbasr store.

When someone orders the CD/DVD, Dbasr will send their order and shipping info to Kunaki’s XML service, which will send back the full price plus shipping. They order it, the order gets sent to Kunaki as ‘pending’. You, the artist, log into Kunaki’s site with your account and pay them their cut and the CD/DVD gets sent.

That’s the theory, anyway. I’m going to test it first. I’d like to figure out a way to automagically pay Kunaki their fee as soon as an order is shipped, but I haven’t really devoted a lot of time to figuring that out yet or even figuring out if it’s possible.

Either way, I think this really opens up a big door for Dbasr users. What do you think? Do you know of any other on-demand-publishing services that are competitive with Kunaki?

My favorite site that I ever used, back in the day, was Josh Davis’s Dreamless message board. Dreamless could be themed by the user, but the default theme was light gray on dark gray with orange/red highlights. Lovely, readable, not too hard on the eyes when you’d been staring at a screen for fifteen goddamn hours without a break or a glance at anything further away than the edge of your desk.

I’m sure there’s an argument for Web 2.0 gradients and semi-three dimensionality here, but I’m just thinking from both a practical and visual standpoint, Dbasr works better without the widgetization.

Let the content provide the color, says I.

Any thoughts?

Actually, I can think of several reasons you might wish to contribute to Dbasr even if you never install it on a single web server. But I’d like to explain, first of all, why I started Dbasr, how I got here, and what it means to me.

(Fair warning: this is a really long post and a lot of it is backstory, both mine and Dbasr’s. If you’re impatient or you’d just like to get to the meat of things, click here.)

I love music. I mean, I really love music. By the current modern metric of music appreciation — how many tracks you have in your iTunes collection — I am somewhere between John Peel and Emperor Joseph II. At last count, I think I could leave my stereo running continuously for three months and never hear the same track twice.

Part of this is certainly due to my upbringing. My grandmother and great-grandmother were both classical pianists (my grandmother, in fact, played live on the classical station in Dallas where Peel was briefly employed in the early 1960s). My mother ran away from home at the age of 13 to be a singer/songwriter; I grew up listening to her talk about the music she loved (mostly mellow country-folk stuff like the Eagles, Gram Parsons, and Dan Fogelberg) and watching her play her heart out at open-mics and showcases in Dallas and Nashville.

For Christmas of my sixth year I got my first records: Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA and John Cougar Mellencamp’s Uh Huh. I wasn’t disillusioned by the American Dream and I didn’t yet understand the melancholy of fading dreams, but I still sat around in my room playing with my Legos and my G.I. Joes singing along about how glory days would pass you by like the wink of a young girl’s eye and how there was a young man in a t-shirt listening to a rock and roll station with greasy hair and a greasy smile. Hip-hop and old country records and dubstep came later; back then, I believed it when they said that rock and roll could change the world. I still do.

I started playing piano badly when I was five; wrote my first (also bad) song when I was eight; started playing guitar and trying to write real music when I was thirteen. It took me a couple of years to stop writing songs that had all the wry lyrical grace of Warrant and the rich instrumental complexity of early Raffi.

I started writing about music for magazines when I was in my late teens, about the same time I started teaching myself HTML. This was the mid 1990s in California, where people were inventing entirely new industries on an hourly basis and doing odd things like buying mansions and turning them into indoor skate parks for hypercaffeinated Linux geeks; it seemed like you could do anything, if you believed in yourself. What did it matter that I hadn’t heard a Velvet Underground record until my editor, R.U. Sirius, took pity on me and gave me their Peel Slowly And See box set? Or that my entire design aesthetic was based on old H.R. Giger album covers? I was a music critic and a web designer, damnit!

Eventually, of course, it became true. You can’t do anything for a long time without getting at least competent at it. I stopped exclusively listening to music with drum machines in it and got a Van Morrison record and an Otis Redding record and a Johnny Cash record. I stopped using Photoshop filters the way Phil Spector used cheap revolvers. I read books by Lester Bangs and Edward Tufte and Greil Marcus and Jakob Nielsen. I hung out online with people who actually knew what they were doing. Eventually, I got good enough that I didn’t actually feel like a fraud when I asked people to pay me to write or design things.

In 2002, I was at the Las Vegas Valley Book Festival and struck up a conversation with a guy named Kurt Huang, who was there to meet the comics creator and critic Scott McCloud. McCloud had written a great deal about the future of selling content online using micropayments; Kurt and his roommate Gyu had written a micropayments system they were calling Bitpass. Somehow I convinced Kurt to allow me to go with him up to McCloud’s hotel room to check out his demo, which was elegant and simple.

Kurt and Scott saw the future of comics there; I immediately saw the future of music. Micropayments were ideal for selling music; the standard unit of measurement for pop music is the three minute song, which is commonly valued at about a dollar apiece.

I pestered Kurt to let me work with him on Bitpass. For a few months, I occasionally flew to Silicon Valley and helped Kurt and Gyu mess around with ideas and logo designs and slept on the floor of their apartment on a tiny futon. Eventually, they actually got funding and a team and started Bitpass.

One day, Kurt and I were wandering around fabulous downtown Mountain View, talking about how we could leverage Bitpass in the music sector. (This is how dot.com entrepreneurs talk.) I started babbling about how iTunes was only open to artists who had record deals (true at the time), and why that was stupid. Why limit yourself to established artists, I thought; bandwidth and storage are cheap and getting cheaper. Why not build a store where any artist could sign up and sell their work?

That was my moment of epiphany. I won’t ever forget it, because in that moment, like a character in a Borges story, I could see everything. I could see the whole future of online music. I could see that the music industry, or at least the model of it that had been working reasonably well for almost a century, was dead. It was dead right then, it just didn’t know it. While there was still money to be made in promoting and producing artists, the traditional distribution methods were over and done with. I knew it.

I went back to Vegas and I called my friend Frank Beaton, and we spent several months sitting on the back porch of my parents’ house with our laptops chugging Red Bull and chain-smoking and writing code. When we were done, we flew to Mountain View and presented Bitpass’s team with our stealth project: Mperia.com, a sort of radical iTunes where any artist could create a profile, upload their music, choose a price for each song and album, and sell it using Bitpass’s payment system.

(If you’re curious about the odd name; “Mperia” was originally meant to be “MP3RIA”, as in “MP3″, with the “3″ turned backwards in the logo. Didn’t work out that way. Ended up being awkward and hard to remember. My fault. If I did it now, I’d probably call it “Facebook”.)

Mperia definitely bucked the trend, in 2003: we wouldn’t allow artists to shoehorn DRM into their recordings, and they could release their work using the recently-created Creative Commons licensing system. (Kurt and I had gone to the Creative Commons release party, where I met Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, who is one of the only people I’ve ever met that I’m completely in intellectual awe of. I also met Sandy Pearlman, who founded Blue Oyster Cult and produced the second Clash record; I’m not sure if I was more intimidated by him or Lessig.)

Mperia was never a priority project for Bitpass; it served more as a showcase of the technology and a proof-of-concept. But that was fine with me. Kurt and Frank and project manager Rachel Gravengaard and I ran Mperia like an indie record label; we did community reachout and sent people stickers and talked to bands in nightclubs about signing up. I remember standing outside a transvestite bar in Las Vegas in 2004, trying to convince an utterly distracted Brandon Flowers that his band, The Killers (who used to play at my open mic at a local cafe), ought to sell their music on Mperia before they actually signed their record deal. Didn’t happen, unfortunately.)

I went to South By Southwest that year with a backpack full of Mperia flyers that I’d printed at Kinko’s the night before. I wandered around sweltering Austin on foot, dripping with sweat and giving them to any musicians who looked interested. I got accidentally pepper sprayed by the cops outside an Ozomatli gig. I went to see the amazing Australian band The Church play at Emo’s, and struck up a conversation with two nice guys. I told them Mperia was perfect for their unsigned band, which was called The National. They agreed to check it out. (Also didn’t happen, unfortunately. Nor did I give an Mperia flyer to Devendra Banhart, because I didn’t think anybody could possibly like his music, because I am an idiot.) Mainly, I just talked to musicians and people from record labels.

We were facing an uphill battle. The digerati, by and large, were anti-micropayments; information wanted to be free, after all, even if it cost a lot of time and money to create it. The EFF and other cyber-liberties groups were pushing peer-to-peer hard as a legal distribution format, but they hadn’t really thought much about how people who created content would actually make money from it.

The most often mentioned solution was to have a voluntary “all you can eat tax”; consumers would pay a fixed voluntary rate every month, and somebody — nobody was quite sure who — would do random statistical sampling of p2p downloads and pay artists according to what percentage of the results was their work. I thought (and still think) this was utterly idiotic; it meant that popular artists would get reimbursed for the work of less popular artists, who would get lost in the noise. The nature of p2p networks (including BitTorrent) reinforces the status quo of big, popular acts being easily available and smaller acts being difficult to find. (Go on The Pirate Bay and see how many people are seeding Justin Bieber’s album. Now look for a band called “The Big Friendly Corporation”. You’ll see what I mean.)

I found myself trapped between two extremes: the out-of-touch record labels, who were demanding summary executions for any stoned college kid who snagged a copy of Dave Matthews Live At Your Mom’s House from Kazaa, and the hysterical cyber-libertarians, who behaved as if any artist who felt that they ought to be able to get paid for the time and hard work and expense of making music “didn’t get it” and was a slavering evil greedy piglet and tool of the “Old Media”. I thought that both of these groups were, to say the least, incredibly misguided.

I was — and still am — completely opposed to DRM-crippled music and suing the hell out of people who just want to listen to music that they love, with no commercial intentions. But I’m also a musician and producer myself, and I know from first-hand experience how incredibly time-consuming and laborious it is to make music. Even with the increasingly low cost of recording equipment, it’s still difficult to make a quality record without spending a few thousand dollars and literally hundreds of hours recording, mixing, producing and mastering.

There was also the question of the record industry itself. Even ten years ago, if you wanted to get your music out to the world, you really needed some kind of contract with a label that could promote and distribute (and usually produce) your work. As any signed musician can tell you, record contracts are hideous things; even successful artists rarely get more than 10% of the profits from sales of their work. And the record label economic model is based on rapid turnover of high-selling acts; get a new pop star in every year or two to generate massive record sales, and then move on to the next one.

Back in the day, record labels used to have what they called “prestige artists”, who were usually established acts or critically successful artists who the label mainly kept around for credibility and because they were known quantities. Leonard Cohen, for example, has never and will never have a Billboard #1 single or record…but his records will always sell and keep selling, decades after they’re released, and he costs very little to produce.

But you see big labels taking less and less of a risk on artists like this; if Leonard Cohen was just beginning his career now, he’d never get signed to one of the majors. He’d be on a label like Saddle Creek or Secretly Canadian…or he’d be releasing his work online.

Mperia, I thought, was a solution to this. Artists didn’t need a label: they could sell their own work directly to their fans and keep the majority of the profits. (We kept 30% of artists’ revenues, which covered our expenses and Bitpass’s transaction fees; originally it was going to be 15%, but this was frankly unworkable.) Music lovers could easily buy music from artists they loved, discover new artists, and all of this in the knowledge that nobody was getting screwed; artists were being compensated for their work, fans weren’t getting gouged on price, everybody was happy, right? How could you fail?

Pretty easily, it turns out. For various reasons, Bitpass closed up shop in January 2007, selling its assets (including the Mperia brand and codebase) to a company called Digital River. The Mperia project was shut down a few months earlier.

And that was that.

In the nearly four years Mperia was running, we didn’t manage to generate much revenue; I have my own theories about that, but I’m not going to get into them here. I can say that we generated a great deal of good will from the digital music community; I’ve been told by artists that the existence of Mperia inspired them to record their work and put it out there. And I’ve seen echoes of Mperia’s mission statement and our vision in a lot of the digital music stores that have come up since. We kept things going with a skeleton budget and nearly no real publicity for a long time, and I’m terribly proud of that.

The day after Kurt called me and told me our little experiment was ending, I walked into the local CVS to buy iced tea and cigarettes. As I walked in, I happened to see the new issue of Wired. It had Beck on the cover, along with the title THE FUTURE OF MUSIC. I flipped through it. It was all about how downloads and indie online music were the Way Of The Future. I stared at it for what seems like an hour. If I’d had a gun, I think I probably would have shoved it in my mouth and blown my brains all over the cardboard Revlon girl next to the magazine rack.

I bought the magazine. I took it home. I read it from cover to cover. Then I ripped the cover off, threw the rest of the magazine in the trash, and stuck Beck to the wall with a thumbtack. I took a Sharpie and wrote DO IT BETTER NEXT TIME across the cover.

Mperia failed, but I don’t think it failed because the idea was bad. I think it was a combination of timing and business factors that were out of our team’s hands. I think we were right.

So I started thinking about how to take my own advice, to do it better next time. Part of the problem, I realized, was that we were locked into using Bitpass, which was in my opinion a great and easy-to-use payment system, but not a widely adopted one. If you wanted to buy music from Mperia, you had to create a Bitpass account and put money in it. This put barriers between the buyer and their music.

I also started to think that part of the problem was trying to create a centralized “storefront” for music. It seemed to run counter to the whole point of the Web — creating a free environment where anybody could stake a claim.

At the time, MySpace was the 800 lb. gorilla of both social networking and music; if you had a band, you had to have a sampling of your tracks on MySpace. But MySpace is ugly and clumsy, and music is shoehorned in as an afterthought to what the site was designed for (which has always been, so far as I can tell, schadenfreude for the expanding waistlines and receding hair of the people who were mean to you in high school, and also meeting exciting and wonderful new people to have sex with). Facebook is even worse. Music is just not what these sites are meant for.

There are music-specific social-type network sites for bands, such as ReverbNation and Bandcamp. These are great tools for what they do, but I think they miss the point. Musicians — really any kind of artist — need their own unique presence online. Their web presence needs to match up with their individual aesthetic, and they need to be able to interact with their fans and publish work in ways that they and their fans choose. I’ve come to firmly believe this.

So after spending a fair amount of time sitting in a dark room listening to Springsteen’s Nebraska and being depressed about Mperia’s collapse, I started thinking about what I could build that would replace it.

At first I considered writing plugins for WordPress. I love WordPress. It’s one of the best and, I think, most important tools that’s been released for the Web ever. But WordPress is for blogging; it’s made for publishing and organizing text, in the form of blog posts and pages. It’s not designed for publishing rich media, or more importantly for organizing rich media. You can publish an MP3 with WordPress, but without a lot of hacking and database manipulation, you can’t publish that MP3′s metadata in a searchable, syndicatable, machine-readable format. And I started thinking that was an extremely valuable proposition.

So I started working on the idea that has become Dbasr. I read lots of books on user experience. I studied Bandcamp and ReverbNation. I talked to lots of musicians. Eventually, I ended up making my own album and releasing it online, using an early version of Dbasr held together with spit and chewing gum.

And now I’m sharing this idea with the world. It’s taken a long time to get to this point, mainly because I’ve never been able to devote much time to sitting down and writing code for Dbasr. I’m not independently wealthy; I have to work for a living. I’m in a weird position because a lot of the projects I’ve worked on professionally in the last decade are either defunct or never actually made it to launch. (I can honestly say, in most cases, that this is not because of me.) So I don’t have much of a portfolio to show prospective employers, even though I have years of experience as a web coder and designer. I’m also, frankly, not much of a corporate guy. Believe me, if I could be, I would, but I’m just not very good at working in a corporate professional environment. I’m terrible at pretending to look busy — half my process consists of staring at things while listening to loud music and smoking lots of cigarettes. I am impatient with corporate politics and I’m not particularly diplomatic. I’m a nerd, in other words. So I’m always hustling, always going from freelance gig to freelance gig.

I want to make Dbasr happen, and I hope that the Internet will help me. Let’s not mince words here: what “crowdfunding” means is I’m asking you to help contribute to paying my rent and my bills so that I can not have to worry about ending up on the street or having my power shut off.

In return, I’m going to treat Dbasr like an actual full-time job, one that I’m actually incredibly passionate about. And I’m going to treat you — all of you, the whole Internet — as my employers. That means I’m going to dedicate my time to Dbasr, eight hours or more a day. I’m going to organize the development process, set milestones to reach, provide you with weekly progress updates. If I can get volunteers to help with the code, I’m going to project manage them. I’m going to listen to your ideas. I may not incorporate all of them, but I will listen. I will make this happen. This isn’t just a cool idea for me; it’s the culmination of a lifetime of thinking about music and computers and communications. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an obsession, but it’s definitely in the same postal code.

So why fund it? If you’re a media artist, it’s obvious: for your $10 or $20 or $100 donation, you’re getting an extremely useful and valuable tool that would cost thousands if you were to pay a developer to build it for you. Though most of my initial planning for Dbasr focuses on musicians as a target, I’m willing to change that scope, because most of the functionality for publishing, selling and sharing any kind of media is already built in. It’s mostly a matter of what you call things: what I call a “gig” a painter would call a “gallery show”, but the way you describe it in a database is almost identical.

If you’re a music lover — what you might cynically call a “consumer” — you’re helping to build something that will give artists an easy way to bring their work to you. You’re helping to give them tools to share their work and to sell it, to make a living from their work. That is the most valuable gift you can give.

I think Rene Ricard said it best, in his essay “The Radiant Child” about the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring:

An object of art is an honest way of making a living, and this is a much different idea from the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. The bourgeoisie have, after all, made it a scam. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.

I’m not under the delusion that Dbasr is going to save the world. I’m not curing cancer here; I know that. What I’m trying very, very hard to do, though, is to help people who are inspired to create find a way to share that inspiration, to free themselves from a system which has been designed to take advantage of their fervor and their desperation, and to make sure that every person who would like to have a voice can do so, whether they’re an expert HTML coder or just someone who makes beautiful pictures or beautiful sound.

And that’s why I hope that you’ll contribute to Dbasr.