Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Music
X-Ross writes "As big labels battle it out in a Post-Napster world, open source comes to music ... Creative Commons has a feature on an open source style music site for artists launched by Sal Randolph. Here is the link to her site Opsound."
. . . the perfect fit for hip-hop artists and samplers like Puff Daddy/P-Diddy. That is, if anyone contributes anything of any worth *)
If you take a look at the site, it seems to be mostly experimental music. This is stuff that is unlikely to have broad appeal (or large financial value), and is therefore very unlikely to be picked up by a label. Putting it in the public domain is therefore a very appropriate way of getting it out to interested people.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
> Creative Commons has a feature on an open source style music site
I've heard of jazz, grunge, and calypso, but what does "open source style music" sound like?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There is nothing like the OpenBsd Song
hey, you said it ain't bad to unveil your politics
and hey, you said it ain't bad to show your special tricks
you'll find out, wait patiently and let things take their course
hey, you shouldn't keep back your thoughts and good ideas
and hey, you shouldn't detect your ancient fears
it's yourself who keeps working the idea behind it all
(ref)
and the open source is on your mind
let the inspiration be your satellite
disclose your sources and feel free to gain an insight
hey, you said it ain't bad to believe in openness
and hey, you said it ain't bad to invest in your progress
it so easy to be part of it
hey, you said it ain't bad to unveil your politics
and hey, you said it ain't bad to show your special tricks
you'll find out, wait patiently and let things take their course
share the liberty, I care for the things in me
and pass them all to you
share the sources, enjoy the forces
that spread between us all
http://www.magic-mushrooms.de
If the purpose of this stuff is to be sampled and remixed and whatnot, isn't a lossless format like FLAC preferable to MP3 or Vorbis?
There seems to be a multitude of sites already that provides this feature, or allow for sharing sounds in central or decentralized repositories. A few links can be found at http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Music/Sound_F iles/Samples_and_Loops/ and much more by a quick keyword search or two.
I'd rather use Gnutella and filter the searches on AIFF files.
I give my music for free to this lady, and she gets to make money giving it to others, while I get nothing? I think I'll pass.
Little-by-little, musicians and producers are finding interesting new ways to distribute - and get paid for - their music. A recent model that has a band offering limited release recordings for a lot of money. They'll make their money on the first 100 subscribers, at $1200@, and then do another release, and so on. This is just one of dozens of new distribution ideas out there.
a y. jsp?vnu_content_id=1859066
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_displ
The market is busy at work for optimal music distribution, and that market has already written the epitaph of the music majors.
Innovative models like the above - including Opsound - are popping up all over the place. Soon there will be many ways to get the music content you want without having to deal with the majors.
For artists however, the current system is random, in addition to being not-at-all profitable except for the very highest echelon artists - those that already have a recording success under their belt. Also, it's not often that that even successful artists can create one song after another that consistently please their fans. There is a lot of waste and inefficiency in the system.
One long term answer to the above dilemma will be based on technologies that are currently in their infancy. Consumers will someday be able to know what elemental parts of a song - things like specific keys, harmonies, melodic structures, etc. appeal to them - really, appeal to those parts of their brain that cognate music in ways that please them.
Once these technologies mature, music distribution will be geared more toward pleasing a specific cognitive taste. Services will be created to decipher and forward appropriate music to consumers for review, based on an analysis of their inherent cognitive tastes. Many of these models will be predictive, and be able to intelligently suggest what new music, from artists never before experienced, would be pleasing to a specific customer's ear.
New technologies like the ones hinted at above will open up the international market for music. This will create a music distribution renaissance that dwarfs the current 'world' music and 'majors' scene.
Corroborating some of the above - and looking forward to the near-long-term - music distribution is going to be singles-only, and probably based on a peer-to-peer system that results in a floating price for content. Content that is good, and in demand, will cost more than content that few people (relatively speaking) care about.
All music distributed this way will have to be interoperable amongst many digital devices. If you buy the song file, it will be yours to do with as you please. Nothing else - long term - will work. There is no DRM system that can't/won't be broken.
The only leverage that large music producers have at this time is legacy content. Consumers want access to that. Also, many major acts, hyped by the music distribution machine, are under contract and producing under the current system. Thus, current content is still in demand, but decreasing, as evidenced by the majors failure to produce as much of it as they did in the past [In their dying throes, the majors, via the RIAA, are attempting to blame their decrease in music CD production on illegal file-sharing - a proven red herring]
The catch - for the majors - is that mostly everything from the legacy vaults is already recorded somewhere as Mp3's, or on CD/DVD w/o DRM. The same is happening to currently produced, and distributed, content. Unless the majors find a very smooth, seamless way to inexpensively distribute their content, their game is over - because everyone will soon have what they need from pirated sources. This will really be a shame if it happens; but the intransigent majors, lacking imagination, will only have themselves to blame.
- download openboyzband-0.2.3.tar.gz ./2b3
- tar -zxf openboyzband-0.2.3.tar.gz
- cd
- make config
- make single
- make install_single
- xmms 2b2.mp3
*** core dump ***
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So who is registering openboyband.org, openrock.org, openjazz.org, etc?
;-)
Hopefully we'll also be lucky in that music will thrive or die like software; the craptastic open project like Open Boy Bands will die out.
The site is getting slashdotted at the moment, but I think I already looked at the site before. It's a good idea, and I'm glad someone is trying it.
I just noticed yesterday that to use music as background for a video or presentation, you need to "rent it" and that those fees are pretty steep. It is only the logical conclusion of royalty-based music distribution, but the end result is that artists are unable to use the cultural building blocks to make new things.
People get in a panic about written copyright, but did you you ever stop and realize that no recorded music has yet fallen into the public domain? It would be one thing to say: you may listen/download/use only music that is in the public domain, but quite frankly, but up until very recently, there really hasn't existed any such kind of music. Some protections have been established for fair use and sampling, but individuals find it rather scary to risk the threat of litigation.
The problem with mp3 "stealing" is not that you are stealing money from the record companies, but that you are ignoring those artists who have established liberal distribution rights. If individuals were required to pay "full price" for a download/mp3 (however ridiculous that might be), it would give groups like opsound a chance to be heard. If licensed music is as free as creative commons music, then the consumer sees nothing wrong with the current state of lawlessness. If however, licensed music were controlled by some sort of drm, the natural instinct of many people would be to ignore them and look for more alternative sounds. And I would argue that artists, viewing the tradeoffs, might be more inclined to choose putting music in the public domain (if it resulted in more publicity). The status quo gives no real advantages for charitable artists.
I should mention that a wonderful book Digital Aboriginals talks about this issue, asking whether anyone can "own the wind."
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I believe I prefer the model presented at http://penguinsong.net/net/intro
Email: slashdot3@FreeMars.org (Address will be abandoned when it gets spam.)
Just want to say props to all of us RIT Homz that gradumated today.
Yeah.
PROPS.
http://saveie6.com/
Aside from that, there is more than enough open-source music available for everyone's use, for free: Circle of fifths, A-minor scale, 1-4-5 blues chord progressions, things like that.
(I'll admit that some of Frank Zappa's stuff is pretty heavily encrypted, but his family's been nice about not waving the DMCA at us.)
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
As it is, the final mixed product (anything derived from a final 2 track mix - i.e. CD, 8-track tape, LP, etc.) is equivalent to a binary. To have the "source, you must have access to all the multitracked elements. This is the recorded stuff and any MIDI tracks also. Other than isolated instances (like the "mix a Beck song" promotion a few years back for Acid), I don't think any artist (or whoever owns the multi track source) will be willing to let anyone have them, even if it were simple to do. Yeah, one could reverse engineer the source by recording a new multitrack source, but no matter how well these new musicians can mimic the original artist, it still isn't the same thing. The new "source" can never be complete, since it will lack the true personal playing style of the artist. And I doubt the original artist will be at your beck and call just to lay you down a new track.
The problem with Napster is that some musicians want to be rich. They want the big break. They want to be famous. So they sell their soul to the "Big Labels." The Devil is the Devil.
When you listen to music, you're listening to the source code. There is no compiler. If you can hear it, you can reproduce it.
*However*, if she *really* wanted to be open source in action as well as name, she'd have sheet music available for all of the works in the library. Unfortunately, I don't know how one would go about notating "dunkin donuts screaming match", "interferences between layers of random waveforms generate these blips and cracks", and whatever else the raver dopeheads are recording nowadays.
The source is the multitrack and MIDI files. And you can never reverse engineer it exactly, because you will NEVER be able to lay down the EXACT waveforms of the original musician's performance.
There's a wide variety of very good creative commons music available, if you happen to like classical, folk, blues, etc. While the recordings are still under copyright, the music itself may be performed, recorded, borrowed, modified, etc. by anyone, royalty-free.
Finding God in a Dog
When I look at this, as a musician, I see a flawed system. Sure, I support the concepts, but it simply doesn't have the same freedoms that an independant artist has come to expect and it doesn't have the money that the signed artists have come to expect.
Why would I want to throw my material out there for free when I can make a little scratch selling it to the locals? Sure, I offer a lot of it up for free, thanks to the powers that I have as an independant, but the fact that I often give it out for free doesn't mean I should offer my stuff up like this.
It's just impractical.
Since some people won't RTFA, and go straight to the opsound site...
Sal Randolph is the woman behind Free Words, which you may have heard of, or seen the bright pink stickers for. In fact, most (if not all) of her work has been free-as-in-whatever-you-want, in a very concrete way, not just conceptually. As such, I think it may be more interesting to some of the geeks around here, even if you (like me), find the Opsound thing rather uninspiring.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
This is NOT NEW. I actually submitted a story about this a full year ago and it got rejected. In fact we have some of these folks on Slashdot right now. My radio station got this guy's CD in the mail... I thought the license was quite interesting so feel free to check out his site here: rootrecords.org
Although I do see a problem with this just as with some GPL software... how do you prove that your original source was ripped off by someone else, who is now making millions?
That's essentially what the article's site does, provide musical binaries for integration into a derivative work. One still has to do the same amount of work in creating that new derivative as in creating something from scratch.
I'd hit i... oops, wrong site!
Include works by RMS, such as the free hackers song?
Most of the action in the world of free music is people making old, public-domain sheet music available on the web, sort of like Project Gutenberg does for books. Here is a relevant Open Directory category. (Just so you don't think I'm a total whiner, here is some PD music I've transcribed myself.)
Find free books.
If this is like any other online label, its TOS will require artists to guarantee that any musical works that they wrote and recorded are original. How can an artist guarantee that he did not accidentally copy a popular song? What specific steps can an artist take to avoid George Harrison's fate?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Basically, I am just trying to point out that all this is doing is throwing in another middleman.
*random record scratching sounds* "He-he-hello .. my name is Lin-Lin-Linus .. and I pronounce Linux as Li-Li-Linux"
;)
Really tho, if OpenBSD can have there own song, so should Linux!
Werner Icking was an inspiration to many musicians, especially in Europe.
PD music needs more advocates like Iking. A project like Gutenberg only for music is what he tried to get started. His early death is all the more sad because there has been very little done to expand his idea since his death.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
(disclaimer: I'm a part of blip)
this is a perfect time to mention justablip recordings, a new music label based in London. blip has been started by Thrash (Kris Weston), formerly of the Orb. it has been formed over his problems with the music industry & frustrations w/ large corporations that fund death & strangle your rights. Justablip music (electronic/experimental/washingmachinesexmusic) will be released under a free license (as yet undetermined).
anyways, check out some of the articles that Thrash has written & see where he's coming from. there are no releases available for download, but they should be shortly, I think the first release may be a poke at Madonna that most people on here will enjoy. sign up at the website too.
ant
justablip director
Been doing it for like a year now. It looks like her stuff is just sounds and loops and stuff, in a big pool. At my site, you can listen to a CD (half-length) of real music, and download the individual tracks or each song if you want to remix it. I also wrote a new license, the OSML, which I based on the GPL.
BTW, the site hasn't been updated in a while because I've been working on a new album. The whole site's gonna have a huge rebirth once I finish it.
c-hack.com |
the idea that i should want to release my music under an open source license is insulting. my music is an expression of my aesthetic preferences. giving unknown others the freedom to recontextualize it without my input is worse to me than selling my music to an advertiser for cash -- not only does it reduce a song's value aesthetically without any chance of control on my part, but it furthers the notion that music is not something businesses looking for a sound for their tv spot should have to pay for.
already, it's common enough for companies and producers wanting cheap tunes to offer an underground artist a small amount of money for the use of a piece. the artist has no bargaining power because there are thousands of other smalltime underground producers. thus he must choose either to receive a little exposure and a few dollars from a rich company (pitiful compared to professional standards), or get nothing at all!
putting music out there and encouraging others to use it for free just makes it that much harder for those who want to make a living off their art -- i'd go so far as to say it's irresponsible. it's fine for people to make their music available as free mp3 downloads... i mean, if nobody knows you, nobody is going to pay just to check out if you're any good or not. but for the love of god, keep your copyright.
i allow downloads of my music at a lowish bit rate. i'm not so precious about my tunes that i don't let anyone hear them, but i'm not about to give away what i spend so much time on for personal and commercial use. *cough* especially after an incident last summer where someone downloaded a high quality mp3 of a song i'd made available on my site and had it released on vinyl under their name ---> scroll down to the last item of the faq for the story
to be fair, there's some merit to that site. some things are best freely distributed... for example non-song samples of instruments and vocals that are useful for cutting up electronically and constructing new songs.
but on the whole, i give opmusic a thumbs down (for what it's worth).
What I'm looking for are various samples of well miked intividual drum hits and cymbal strikes. I've resorted to sampling these from various CDs I own, but it's very rare that you get a well-recorded strike that's allowed to fully ring out.
There are many studios with good acoustics, professional mikes and pro digital recording gear. Why hasn't someone taken the 10 minutes to record individual drums? And it's not like it would be a lot of data to host. Most samples are less than 5 seconds long! Even at 24bit/96Hz lossless, it wouldn't produce big files.
I'd honestly be much more interested in an open source project like this than what the guys are doing on the website.
If you use Moz you can add a bookmarklet that will tell you if an album is distributed by an RIAA memeber.
This is from their website:
What is RIAA Radar?
The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America.
Neat.
Wax on, wax off baby!
Don't forget, there are other people out there who have been doing this for awhile too, such as the Open Music Registry.
Did you ask these people if they wanted it before you foisted your IP on them? Seriously. No one wants it, even for free. So STFU!
Never transmit any IP without the receiver's permission if you want to be compensated for it. And even then, it should only be transmitted to people who want it and will pay your fee.
So if correspondence and talking are items are things you consider IP and want a payment, first hammer out an agreement. Once that agreement is made and you are paid, talk and write to the terms of the pact. But until then, keep you damn mouth shut.
Looks like people are taking this as "free" music rather than open source music. If it's open source, does it mean we can change it and then release it into the public again until it is "fit for the ear?"
If it's really open sourced music, then maybe we can turn experimental music to pretty much commercial like music which a lot of people agree upon
do not in anyway underestimate anybody, especially yourself
I can understand the apprehension of professional musicians at this stuff. One answer is that the revenue stream may have to shift towards performance rather than recording sales.
For the hobbyists, closet musicians, and mad scientists relentlessly twisting knobs on hopelessly complicated Reaktor synths, this is great. I've been trying to get something like this going among my friends for a while now.
When I think of the origins of music, I think of a bunch of people around a fire making songs with whatever was at hand. The advent of sound recording, expensive equipment, and media conglomerates generated more advanced means of making and manipulating music, while creating a relatively closed system. It was no longer possible for the average person to make the kind of music they listened to. Now it seems like everyone is doing it. So what if P Diddy's empire crumbles? Musicians who really have something to offer to a crowd looking for a great experience will never go broke.
This is pretty unrelated to this article but oh well. I was thinking, there should be a software liscence like music is. When someone preforms a song, you have the source to that song. You can figure out the notes and the words. However, you cant just go out and make money by stealing the words or music. This is how it should be with software. You should be able to have the source, and mess around with it but you shouldnt be able to sell it or give it back to the community or anything. You should be able to modify and patch the source howeever you want to. Just like you can with music.
Well, if you're really wealthy, you might try cryogenic freezing.
<sarcasm style="voice-family: Daffy Duck">Ha-ha, very funny. Ha-ha, it is to laugh.</sarcasm>
I did not link to an article about the death of George Harrison. Instead, I linked to an article describing a successful lawsuit against Harrisongs Music on grounds that George Harrison unconsciously copied a copyrighted musical work when writing "My Sweet Lord". How can songwriters learn from this mistake, and what steps can they take to avoid copying other people's songs?
Will I retire or break 10K?
A related site
I hope to see more of these popping up on the web soon.
How can music be "open source"? I've never seen music source code before... Perhaps they mean free for personal/noncommercial use? Or even public domain?
Wasn't pop music in Orwell's 1984 produced by machine?
I go to a lot of concerts in small venues and from what I pick up from talking to the musicians the break even point seems to be about fifty or sixty in the audience for each band member. Most of these shows make do with the house lights and the show is watching great musicians at work. Now granted these concerts tend in genres that don't attract huge audiences, but the musicians are usually excellent and frequently include some of the best in the world.
Most of these guys manage to make a decent living and have careers that span decades. So it possible to make a living from touring. Personally I don't want to see a light show unless it's a concert at a big venue where the intimacy of the small concert is lost.
on my way to work yesterday, I was listening to the newest bright eyes album and got to thinking about how plausible an open source band would be. in my estimation, as far as rock/punk is concerned (electronic music, by and large, is pretty much open source, at least for live mixes), it would end up being the modern equivalent to protest songs...and not the kind being offered up by system of a down, either. someone would write a song, someone else would hear it, and play a cover, but make some slight changes either to the music or the lyrics. another person hears that and it evolves even further, and eventually, you've got a song that's been passed around and morped to fit a specific set of circumstances and resembles the original in the loosest of ways.
could it work? on a small scale, probably so. would there have to be a definite driving force behind it (read: social movement and/or movement messiahs)? most definitely. are there artists who would willingly forego royalties for the sake of an idea? if people are willing to do it for code, then I'm certain there are people out there who have contemplated doing the very same thing with their music, and realistically, even if they were just giving their music away, there are other ways they could compensate for not making any capital off of the music itself...merchandise, percentage of the door/bar, etc. unless, of course, they were hardcore and only played free shows...and there are some bands who've been known to do just that (against me! comes to mind...I'm fairly certain propagandhi has done a couple, as well...I just can't come up with any bands that have done nothing but free shows).
I'm rambling, and I probably should have slept and/or collected my thoughts before posting...but now I think I'll journal on this or something, seeing as how music is an absolute obsession of mine.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
It kind of sounds like this, but there's less emphasis on the listener's freedom and more acceptance of commercial involvement.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
When I look at free music I see the cost of hosting as the main obstacle. Unfortunately up to now their isn't opensource software to help this. Stuff like BitTorrent doesn't give the original host the option to control the copyright and to withdraw the music if it wants so. My ideal kind of software would be so that even companies as mp3.com would use it if they could find the volunteers for hosting. Such kind of software could become the basis on which many music sites could be founded.
As for licenses: I don't think it is very important that musicians give up all rights on their music - as opensource advocates would like to see. Instead I would like to see the establishment of some registry where musicians could register under what license they release their music. They should also be able to change their license, for example withdrawing their music from free distribution if they want so. Such a license should be simple and the accent should be on things that people want to do with their music, like using it on internet radio (or even real radio) and as samples.
The Dismemberment Plan has posted the individual tracks for several of their songs on their website, allowing fans the opportunity to remix them. I personally remixed two songs, which was a very enjoyable experience.
Ok, this is both karma-whoring and shameless plugging. All in just one comment! :-)
I did some kind of "music CD" by myself too, which I called Random Stuff. It's me playing guitar (no, it's not shred) and using samples for the backings. And it's free (as in beer and as in speech) for everyone to download (mp3 format now, but ogg are in the works) and use. So you could say, to some extent, that it's "open source music". It has some limitations, anyway:
Those are really the only limitations. IANAL, so I may be forgetting something extremely important :-) I use samples from free sites (as Loopasonic or Acid Planet), so I guess there's no problem on that part.
But then, of course, that's not all. I also sell self-burnt CDs to my friends, or anyone that wants one :-) The CDs have a data track and several audio tracks (the songs). In the data part there are HTML pages explaining who I am and what I used (software, hardware, etc.) and mp3 of the songs in the CD plus some rarities that have so bad quality that I didn't dare to put them as audio tracks. I made a cover for it using Kover and The Gimp. As a finishing touch, I sign each CD (all 7 of them, by the moment O:-)). It's a pity, but the central part of it, the music, was made using Sonic Foundry's Acid Music. I'd like to use an OSs app for Linux (or Windows, but OSS), but I found none as simple and useful as Acid Music. Maybe Ardour, but I hadn't tried it yet.
It's quite an amateurish attempt, but the secret aim behind it is not money, nor fame, nor critical acclaim; it's chicks! :-P ;-)
My weblog in spanish
It's a nice idea, but Ozzy would probably say "Who the fuck gives a fuck".
Open source is the art of letting other people write your bad code.
I've never seen music source code before
Have you ever walked into a store that sells musical instruments? Most such stores stock sheet music, which can be considered a form of musical source code.
Have you ever looked at a MIDI file? MIDI files are tokenized representations of musical source code.
Will I retire or break 10K?