Now, public libraries in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Fort Worth, and most recently New Orleans have launched their own community-oriented streaming services using MUSICat’s open source software. Joshua Smith works at New Orleans Public Library and has been embedded in the city’s rich music scene for over a decade. He oversaw the launch of Crescent City Sounds with help from a team of curators that represent local artists and business owners, music journalists and historians and more. “They helped me get the word out to the music community,” Smith told Motherboard, noting that their community status helped spread the word that the library now accepts digital music submissions. Smith says that for this first round, the curators accepted albums from artists that were released in the last five years, and that while living within city limits wasn’t necessarily a deal breaker, not gigging regularly in the area was. To be considered, applicants needed to submit at least one track from their album. […] He says each selected artist received a $250 honorarium to license their music to the New Orleans Public Library for five years — a far cry from the fractions-of-a-penny per stream paid to independent artists by platforms like Spotify. This honorarium and licensing agreement is roughly the standard for public libraries following Rabble’s process model. Austin does insist that libraries using MUSICat meet the basic criteria of paying artists to license their work to their libraries. But for everything else, Austin notes that these pre-established models are guidelines, not guardrails.
One example of a public library that took MUSICat and ran with it is Capital City Records — the music streaming platform of the Edmonton Public Library in Alberta, Canada. An early adopter of MUSICat, the library’s collection has grown to amass over 200 local musicians. The project also created opportunities for the library to engage in spin-off projects like limited run of vinyl pressings and running library-focused music events throughout the city. While over 2,000 artists are featured on one of MUSICat’s music platforms, Austin says the company wants to continue forming partnerships with libraries on the local level. So for music lovers looking to jump ship from Spotify, he has a clear message: “This is not Spotify for libraries,” Austin said. “It’s a little different. The localness is kind of key. I don’t think we could, for example, use the same strategy on the same fee to license on aggregate collection, which was all the local music from all the libraries available on the music hat app, right, like something like that would need to, it would need to be about the local collections and take people to them and let them play that music in context.”
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