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Pearl Jam Releases Video Under Creative Commons
minitrue writes "Pearl Jam released their first music video in quite a while under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone to "legally copy, distribute and share the clip" for noncommercial purposes. Creative Commons thinks this may be the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. So although the file is only available as a free download via Google Video through May 24, fans can continue sharing it online themselves in perpetuity."
If you're looking for other Slashdot advertized "free" music, check out Harvey Danger who had an article about them here last year. Their album is distributed via Bit Torrent.
Oh You POS
And forgive me, as I'm using a Mac, but I was able to open it in QuickTime, and I could easily edit it and export it to a different format.
Albuquerque PC
Another cool thing the band does is sell all their concerts via download in either MP3 ($9.99) or FLAC ($14.99); in the previous Canadian tour the downloads were often available within 24 hours of the show, now they're a couple days later. These shows are soundboard quality (pretty much the best you can hope for in a "bootleg") and completely DRM. The band is even cool about people trading shows; they've stated in the past they don't expect the average fan to buy every show -- just get a couple, like the ones you go to, and trade with your friends. In the 2000 tour, they were selling actual CD's of their shows for near cost (9.99 for a double CD), I don't believe the band themselves made a profit from the sale. This was in order to stop the ridiculous prices their old bootlegs went for on eBay despite that fact that you can get almost any show for free by just asking on alt.music.pearl-jam.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I don't think a band that debuts at #2 on the Billboard Top 200 chart is "an over-the-hill burnout band, trying desperate internet publicity stunts in order to stay relevant."
Considering Tool was at #1 that same week, I would say Pearl Jam is still quite relevant. Will they sell as many albums as quickly as they did with Ten or Vs.? Maybe not, but they have gone Platinum on every album they have released. IIRC.
True, I have seen very few bands embrace free disitribution licenses, but I doubt most artists are even aware that these licenses exist. What I have seen is bands explicity stated that they don't mind their work being shared freely.
The first example that comes to mind is Wilco. Given, they're not young, but they never had much success on the charts until recently. After they produced an album that was deemed too 'experimental', they were dropped from their label.
Instead of giving up, they put an mp3 stream of the whole album on their site and openly embraced file sharing. The album started to get a lot of buzz. Soon enough an independent label agreed to release the record, despite the fact that "hundreds of thousands" of people had already downloaded it (at least according to singer Jeff Tweedy in the Wired interview).
The album was critically acclaimed and became their greatest commercial success to date, reaching #13 on the Billboard charts. Their next album sold even better, reaching the top ten.
Another example - Sufjan Stevens, who actually is a "young rising star", recently said in an interview
Not everyone giving away their music is over the hill - and some of them are still making a living making music.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
That's Todd McFarlane, of Spawn and Spiderman comics fame. Seth MacFarlane is the Family Guy/American Dad dude.
That definitely would have made for quite a different video.
J
Here is a copy of the videos on a school server. Cheers.