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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."
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.
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.
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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.
DUH
its 2b3.mp3 dumbass.
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.
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
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.
The thing about middlemen? Sometimes they don't just get in the way. In this case, it's easier to go to one big warehouse for royalty-free content than it is to scour dozens of websites looking for exactly what you need.
I understand that not everyone is going to want to release complete works into this pool of ideas. But if you found some of their content worthwhile, you may want to give back by contributing some of the sounds you collected as part of your work, or maybe an acoustic version of the song, or a song without a vocal track (so that fans and other wannabes can practice their m4d 4m3r1c4|\| 1d01 5k1llzzz).
Another reason to contribute, which the website mentioned, is that it may catch the attention of someone who wants to use your work in ways which the license doesn't allow. For those uses, they still need to go to you and negotiate.
The system might not be perfect for everyone or everything, but I think some good things are going to come out of it.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
That's right on what I was trying to get at. Getting back to music for the sake of music itself! Forget the mega lightshow, pyro, ear-destroying SPL's, gargantuan mixing / digital re-processing booth, and smelly chewing-gum infested amphitheaters! (:
Regarding size, I have also been to some pretty large concerts without the above nonsense. And I'd wager a bet that those ones are some pretty nice money-makers.
Then don't put it under GPL (or the musical equivalent).
Je ne parle pas francais.