OPEN MUSIC: Open Source

A thumbnail sketch, a jeweler’s stone, a mean idea to call our own. . .

Since before the pandemic hit, the Berklee-MIT members of the Open Music team have been pushing on RAIDAR, a working, student-led model to show vs tell the principles and protocols of Open Music. We demo’ed RAIDAR in person at the NYC Summit in 2019 and continued building, doubling down when the pandemic hit.

With the pandemic came an influx of Berklee student participation as students were sent home and craved real-world experiences to dig into. The RAIDAR team grew to include dozens of students and alumni from Berklee College of Music, Boston Conservatory, Berklee Valencia and Berklee Online. Students headed up marketing, biz dev, legal and education design, with professors supporting and guiding from behind.

The RAIDAR student team was also included in the first Exit to Community cohort, hosted by Zebras Unite and University of Colorado’s MEDLab. There they workshopped the prospect of building a student artist-led, student artist-owned music licensing platform, and learned why that can be so transformative for artists.

We are standing on the shoulders of past Open Music projects, including experiments with Red Bull Media House in London, our Summer Labs with IDEO, and the initial API docs that were developed. What we now have to share is our direct-to-consumer licensing platform, and more importantly, a community-led movement that is just getting started, with the code behind it ready to share.

Open source means that we want to build with you, our Open Music community. Many of you have already let us know you’re ready to plug in or build on top of RAIDAR. In 2021 we will share more information on what that means, and how it will work. Until then, check out GitHub here and get in touch. We look forward to building with you.