Libraries are here to connect patrons to information. Sure, we have a bunch of different kinds of information and different formats: paper books, programs, articles, and more. And one of those formats is music. Look around your community, and you have an assortment of local musicians. Wouldn’t it be great to promote them, and to share them with your community members so everyone can enjoy them? Several libraries have done just this!

Check out this article excerpt, and ponder adding this kind of service to your own library. You can read the whole thing here.

Libraries Are Launching Their Own
Local Music Streaming Platforms

“Over a dozen public libraries in the U.S. and Canada have begun offering their own music streaming services to patrons, with the goal of boosting artists and local music scenes. The services are region-specific, and offer local artists non-exclusive licenses to make their albums available to the community.

The concept originated in 2014 when Preston Austin and Kelly Hiser helped the Madison Public Library build the Yahara Music Library, an online library hosting music from local artists. By the time they completed their work on Yahara, they were confident they had a software prototype that other interested libraries could customize and deploy.

“That became kind of the inspiration for building MUSICat,” Austin told Motherboard, referring to the software platform he and Hiser created under a startup called Rabble.

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. 

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. 

“The goal of this was to make every round that we add albums to it to be as reflective of the local music scene as possible,” he said. “Personally, I was looking for things that are less what you think of when you think of New Orleans music because people think of us in a certain way. There’s an incredible diversity to the music scene here. And, you know, just the diversity of the city. So we’re trying to make everything as reflective of that as we could this round.” 

Crescent City Sounds now has 29 albums and artists. Smith hopes that in future calls for submissions, the curators can reach out to artists to fill in collection gaps. However, the collection that debuted in October includes genres that range from traditional jazz and brass bands to surf rock, funk and hip-hop infused Mardi Gras Indian music. 

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. 

“We offer a platform that pulls a core piece of this puzzle together,” Austin said. “We give them a great tool set for that, and we give them a process model that has sort of proven virtues that they can know about in advance. But the collection that’s created and the community around it, and the places that it can go, that’s much bigger than we are.” “

You can read the entire article here!

This sounds like such a cool idea – and a great way to connect with some members of the community who may not otherwise realize the power of the library!