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."
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.
There is nothing like the OpenBsd Song
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.
- 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
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.)
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.)
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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.
Payment for their songs is the only way they have to pay off those loans.
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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.
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?
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?
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
If it's anything like the OSS projects on sourceforge, open source music is just a click track and maybe a bass line. The rest of the tracks are "in development" or "coming soon" as soon as the project finds more volunteers.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
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!