open-source music catalogue management software

What is going on?

DMP

DMP is open-source software. Hundreds of music publishers use it in original form, and we know that several music companies, CMOs and software companies use custom versions. If you start using it, you have rights to use, copy, modify... forever.

Cloud-based web application

Although DMP can be deployed to a PC, it is really made to be a cloud-based application. We put a lot of effort into simplifying deployment to the cloud. For two years, this was a click-through process. This has just changed.

Pre-installation wizard

In order to start, DMP requires about a dozen environment variables to be set correctly. For example, ASCAP is "10" (although "010" also works), and 50% is "0.5" The wizard helps in this process. For a custom installation, or installation to Digital Ocean, some copy-pasting has been required, but not for Heroku.

Heroku

Heroku has been a great service provider. They revolutionised how applications are deployed to the cloud and released a lot of their code as open-source. On top of this, they offered free containers (they call them dynos) and databases (limited to 10k rows). And an automated deployment procedure that requires no technical skill, as long as the deployment script is part of the source code.
And DMP source code has that script. And environment variables can be transferred through an URL from the wizard to Heroku.

DMP on Heroku

Simple, advanced, free tier, and no CC for the free tier. The result was that hundreds of music publishers have installed DMP to Heroku, tested it, and some of them chose to use it in production, either on Heroku or elsewhere. We have no idea how many.

Heroku announcement

Heroku announced that they are discontinuing their free services and that their users can either start paying or their containers will be stopped and databases deleted. And they sent an email about it. Look in Promotions or Spam, if you are on Heroku.

Damage control

This put DMP in a bad situation. While it is very simple to install for anyone who is in IT, most small publishers don't have anyone who is in that group. Therefore, we temporarily disabled the wizard. We also postponed release of the next major version of DMP, because we need to do some serious programming first to make it deployable by non-techies. Once it is done, it will also be easier to deploy DMP to other platforms. Then we have to test the process, document it, etc. Quite a lot of unexpected (and unpaid) work.

How to install DMP in the meantime?

If you are reading this paragraph, and you don't know the answer to this question, you did not read carefully enough.