• 

  Artist-Owned Platform

a-op

Distribution has always been one of the most important parts of a career in music. Streaming and downloads. Educational content and release updates. Selling, licensing, memberships, and content delivery systems. Communicating directly with customers and fans. Owning every bit of it.

When iTunes came on the scene, there was another exciting technology brewing: online payments. For me, PayPal was the most forward-thinking company around at the time, simply because you could connect an MP3 audio file to a “Buy” button. While driving back to Philly from New Jersey, I told my wife about an idea I had for a music-for-dancers website. Soon after, my buddy and I went off and started building our first digital distribution company.

Websites for musicians have developed from early bespoke e-commerce platforms to modern website templates and no-code platforms. Because dancers needed music in many different time signatures, durations, and tempos, I had to continually cobble together many different platforms to make one super platform that could manage and process all of the company’s business.

It was a ton of work running a music licensing and composition business, so why would anyone do it? Owning your music and having the ability to license and distribute it to your community is the first major step toward making a living at it...as a normal person. Fame doesn’t come to everyone, so caring for your “1,000 True Fans,” which Kevin Kelly first wrote about in 2008, can provide you with everything you need to survive the ups and downs of a music career over time.

I put thousands of hours into learning how to build software with ChatGPT and Codex. At first, I rebuilt my own company’s website from back to front, and it has been up and running for almost two years now. I got an itch to make this platform available to all the students I work with and other DIY musicians. I knew I did not want to create another distribution platform and charge for it. I wanted to distribute the platform itself for free.

This was an amazing project for OpenAI Build Week! The technical details of the build are covered in README.md. Here, I wanted to show you what this open-source project is capable of building and maintaining. It is free to fork and make your own.

You can simply point ChatGPT Work at the repo and use the Sites plugin to build the basic template. The basic template can be up and running in as little as five minutes. You can then add your music tracks, album art, metadata, educational materials, collections, and any other supporting assets. In a few hours, you can have streaming, subscription plans, download entitlements, license processing, in-app messages, Courses, and Stripe Test Mode payment processing.

With ChatGPT Work and Sites, you can continue to iterate, personalizing the platform by adding more features or removing ones that come with it. This is an artist-owned platform: everything you need to run a great music service for your tribe of fans. Sites runs on Cloudflare, which takes care of everything needed to run the site on the web. A Stripe Test account is only necessary if you plan to test payment workflows.

I will continue to develop a-op to make it quicker and more feature-rich. For this first version, I wanted to nail down the fundamentals of digital distribution and make the platform easily accessible for everyone to copy and make their own. The project comes with an AGPL-3.0-or-later license and can be forked as many times as people need. There is also a “Content Template” spreadsheet to help you organize your music and materials before building them into the site.

I can’t wait to see the thousands of beautiful, truly original, musician-owned websites that come from using a-op. Distribute directly to the people who love your art, want to stay connected, and want to support you. If you decide to start making a living at it, you keep ownership of everything. Powered by new software tools like ChatGPT Work, Codex, and Sites, it is becoming easier to do this on your own or with a small group of artists. This is an incredible time to be an artist!

Built With

• chatgpt
• codex
• gpt-5.6
• sites
• sol
• work