Band Invites Music Copying

R C writes "The BBC is currently running a story about the band Carbon Silicon, including former members of The Clash and Generation X. The report claims that the band is encouraging fans to download tracks, demos, and works in progress from their website . Talking of re-capturing the culture of recording a tape to lend to your friends, they believe that the free availability of their music won't affect sales, and that the availability extra material like tracks in development will attract and engage even more fans."

Comments

OSS

[fembots]

What we need now is Open Source Songs. Tracks in development are released and fans can chip in and make those songs better.

License

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

I see that this is free as in beer, but is it free as in freedom? (can I alter and distribute?)

Nice but not unique

[Knome_fan]

For example recently I discovered http://magnatune.com/ which is a whole label following the same idea.

I think people should really encourage this and btw. they have some pretty nice music there.

(No, I'm in no way affiliated to them, I just like the concept and hand a fun afternoon recently listening through their offerings.)

There have been experiments with this

[jd]

I'm not sure any have been an overwhelming success, but I know of several groups that have released GPL music. I spent some time working on GPLed movies, but the interest wasn't there at that point, so that effort is temporarily on hold, but music is another matter.

GPLed music shouldn't be too hard, as you can start by GPLing scores, MIDI files and the like. The samples would then logically follow (as they are derived works, so must be GPL). Editing at the more basic level would seem easiest, so that is why I'm thinking that is where you'd really want to start.

Music editors (and video editors) fill Freshmeat on a daily basis, so there's no shortage of ways of editing the final tracks, though convincing the RIAA that it is legal might be another matter.