I refer the software project itself as DJ Edna.  As in, Disc Jockey Edna.  When referring to the organization (djedna.org) or the company (djedna.com) I usually pronounce it as a single word: djedna (pronounced “jed-na”).

Neither of these are “official,” it’s just how I’ve been referring to them.  Everyone else is entitled to their own whim.

As for the meaning of “djedna,” you can probably guess that it has multiple interpretations as well.

1. A djed is a pillar-like ancient Egyptian symbol representing stability.  It has been interpreted as the backbone of the Egyptian god of life, death, and fertility, Osiris.  With this interpretation, djedna is the backbone of a musician’s on-line presence.
   

   Egyptian Djed

2. Django (named after jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt) is the pythonic web framework DJ Enda is written with and I felt it appropriate to choose a name for the project that started with “dj”.
   

   Django Reinhardt

3. A “DJ” or Disc Jockey is a person who selects and plays recorded music for an audience.  Edna is a female name that has fallen out of favor with parents in recent years and thus brings to mind a matronly image.  Putting the two together you get a grandmother wearing studio headphones, constantly pushing warm cookies and hot tracks on the masses.
   

   Edna Mode - Not Exactly The Edna I Had In Mind

4. It’s an increasingly rare, six-letter domain name that I was able to snag .org, .com, and .net for.

So, there it is.  The pronunciation and meaning of djedna.  Clear as mud?

Here is a tag cloud that I created from the djedna.catalog2.models file using the very cool website, wordle:

Yes, that’s from the actual source code and yes, I’m a big geek. So, what do all these occurrences of “self” and “path” and “relative” get us? Here’s a list of new features that catalog2 will bring to the table when completed:

• Artist interface (to go along with the existing Fan and Admin interfaces) to allow track uploads, simplified meta-information editing, and music e-commerce workflows.
• Django Sites support to allow record labels to administer many individual artist sites from a single interface.
• The ability to add arbitrary “digital assets” like images, PDFs, or any other file to downloads. Downloads in the previous version would only contain the tracks.
• Support for WAV files in addition to MP3 including the ability to attach multiple versions to a Track.
• Amazon S3 support for storing and serving media.
• Full separation of functionality from presentation in order to make DJ Edna a fully plugable Django application.
• Brand new default interface/design (or “theme”) called Marlowe.

That list of improvements is just off the top of my head. There’s a lot of little improvements going into this re-write that I’m sure I’m overlooking.

That’s the good news. There’s a boatload of new, highly requested features

The bad news is it’s taking much longer than I had anticipated (apologies to those that are waiting patiently for me to complete this before starting on their implementations under the djedna.com umbrella — you know who you are). This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with development experience. Coding always takes longer than you think — even when you think it’ll take longer than you think. Yes, that’s recursion and yes, I’m a big geek.

Although I’ve completed most of the low level coding for the re-write (with some exceptions), I’ve been avoiding starting on Marlowe, the new default “theme”. That’s because HTML/CSS design is not my strong suit. If it’s your cup of tea and you’d be interested in helping out (Django experience/knowledge is not required), send an e-mail to thomas@djedna.org.

Back to the code…

Had I actually tested registration on the laptop (as opposed to only on my main development machine) I’d have discovered that it was not configured to send outgoing e-mail, such as when you sign-up for a new account. Doh! And the error message “Can’t assign requested address” threw me too. Luckily, it was the end of the session so I was able to graciously get out of it, but for those of you that were there, that’s what the error was.

That’s it for my postmortem comments. Back to the code for me. If you were at MinneBar and happened to see me present, feel free to leave a comment or ask any follow-up questions on this post.

Also remember that you can follow DJ Edna progress on the project timeline or check out the roadmap of where the project is headed.

Since I was in a Trac mood, I went ahead and began to set up project milestones and some tickets to outline what needs to be done to reach them.

If you’re waiting for the code to hit a stable point, you might want to subscribe to the active ticket RSS feed to know when we hit our first major release, “Nessman”. Of course, chances are that when that happens, there will be an excited post here on the blog too.

If you just want to try things out, there’s no need to wait for Nessman. In fact, the installation instructions have been greatly simplified so feel free to dive in, the water is warm. And if you do happen to hit any snags along the way, you can always ask questions on the DJ Edna Users Group or submit a ticket.

This will be my first BarCamp and I’m excited to see what all my developer friends have been raving about.

But e-commerce integration isn’t complete yet. While modifying the default Satchmo templates to allow for “Permit Products,” it became clear that the existing DJ Edna views and templates were getting a little long in the tooth. So, like any over-ambitious software architect, I’ve begun a brand new set of views and templates that will correct many of the deficiencies and properly separate the core functionality of the DJ Edna catalog system from presentation-level functionality. This should make creating custom DJ Edna installs even easier.

Finally, when this work is complete, I’ll begin a refactoring of the core catalog models paying special attention to breaking out expensive operations (i.e. scanning a catalog for new tracks) into non-web processes connected to the webapp via a persistent work queue. This should pave the way for a simplified track upload process.

Once all that work is complete, I’ll be tempted to tag a 1.0 release and move on to some more exciting functionality focused around creating and keeping True Fans. More on that in a future post as the current refactoring projects come to a close.

• Part 3 of Sympathy for the Devil: The Plight of the Record Industry is up. scrivener looks at the various reasons “experts” cite for the problems of the recording industry and the solutions they have proposed.
• You can hear me blather on about DJ Edna and the future of the music industry on the First Crack Podcast (hint: it has something to do with digital distribution). I haven’t listened to it yet because, well, it’s my voice and I’m not a rock star. So, if you happen to listen, let me know how I sounded in the comments.
• DJ Edna was written up on the Minnov8 Blog.
• I’ll be giving a presentation on developing DJ Edna with Django to the Ruby Users of Minnesota meeting on March 31, 2008.
• After some brainstorming regarding payment models, I’ve begun another refactoring (this is #4) of the DJ Edna store application. This work is aimed at making the payment model less like a traditional “pay-first” web store and something closer to “bill me later.” I’ll blog more about this new functionality in a future post.
• Two bands, Scatic and Homo Jenkins, have recently contracted with djedna.com to build and host DJ Edna powered web sites.

Part 1 is a prologue to his arguments and starts off by quoting at length from a recent speech by longtime U2 manager, Paul McGuinness where he lays out a dreadful future “solution” for the industry that consists of ISPs spying on user’s activities and becoming the copyright cops. I think scrivener makes an astute observation about the initial sentence from Mr. McGuinness speech:

What I’m trying do here today is identify a course of action that will benefit all: artists, labels, writers and publishers.

Hmmm, who’s missing from that list of interested parties? I won’t spoil scrivener’s answer, go read the post.

Part 2 begins the meat of his analysis. This part laments the fact that the industry has never considered the fan in any of their calculations. In fact, some corners of the industry actually write off all fans as thieves that artists must be protected from.

Check out the series. It’s a very well thought out and written opinion piece that puts the DIY ethic in stark contrast to the big label way of doing things.

1. Full disclosure: I am participating in an interview with the Phree Musiqe Blog about DJ Edna today

Although I’m not finished, I would classify this as a must read for any DIY artist. It’s already inspired some great future feature ideas for DJ Edna.

You can also find it at amazon.com.

He has written an excellent narrative of how a band is lulled into acceptance of an artist-unfriendly contract by record labels. It lays out in a spreadsheet where all the “hidden costs” add up to the band making “about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11.” Oh, and they no longer own their own creative copyrights which means that if their music succeeds on the long tail, they’re out of even more money that would have been theirs had they had the guts and initiative to DIY.

With emerging artist-friendly software (like DJ Edna), the commoditization of hosting and credit card processing services, coupled with Moore’s Law, there’s really no reason this kind of tragedy needs to happen anymore.

The music industry game has changed forever in favor of the independent artist. Some day we’ll look back on the old recording industry business model in the same way we look back on how the meat processing industry was run at the turn of the century. The next generation of artists will simply shake their heads and wonder how the need to distribute small plastic discs ever led to such industry greed and artist misery.

I’m pretty damned amazed that I know anyone who’s written 2000 songs, let alone doing so in 2000 days. Go check out some of the best as chosen by the artist himself.

Here’s a couple of examples from theskullcranes.com:

I believe that embedded tracks like this represent the future of the “single”. Having artist chosen tracks appear in fans blogs and social media sites will eventually replace radio airplay as the preferred method of releasing songs. Especially if the RIAA succeeds in killing internet radio.

This post in particular is an excellent summary of who copyrights actually benefit (hint: it’s not the artist).

So, what’s the moral of the story? Just distribute your own material yourself (using something like DJ Edna). If someone is ripping you off to the degree that you should do something about it, you’ll know (because if you don’t, chances are it wasn’t popular enough to matter anyway) and be able to hire a lawyer to go get your money. Or, for free, you can publicly shame the violator on your artist blog.

As with all things in life, fear can make you do silly things.

Instead, I believe that the inevitable change in the industry has to start with the artists themselves. No changes in law are necessary for artists to simply deny giving major labels artistic copyrights to protect in the first place. The music industry won’t change until the artists themselves decide to change it. After all, the artists are the most powerful force in the industry, not the labels. The major labels simply parasite off that forfeited artist power and use it for their own ends.

“As I’ve said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers — which doesn’t seem that outlandish at this point — then I guess we’ll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.”

One more lesson for independent artists — don’t sue the fans that are giving you money.

If you’re not interested in reading, the short version is that CD sales are down and digital sales are up.  So, if you’re looking at using DJ Edna to digitally distribute your music (and you must be if you’re reading this), you’re on top of industry trends.  Grats.

The djedna.org team is proud to announce the initial release of djedna, an open-source and free software package to help artists and independent labels manage online digital distribution of their art. The recent, highly-successful digital-only release, In Rainbows, by the band Radiohead illustrates how important it is for today’s artists to retain control over their online presence and digital products. The djedna software package was created to help tech-savvy musical artists or artists with a tech-savvy friend to easily create and manage their own online and offline digital sales. This control allows the artist to bypass traditional distribution middlemen in order to interact with and sell directly to their fans.

Twin-Cities based rock quartet, The Skullcranes, will be the first band to deploy a djedna-powered website. It will launch in coordination with their upcoming release, Come On Feel The Short Bus, on December 8th, 2007.

# # #

If you’d like more information about this topic visit http://www.djedna.org, or to schedule an interview with Thomas Bohmbach, Jr. (Founder and Lead Developer - djedna.org), please e-mail Thomas at thomas@djedna.org