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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."
These are guys who've been in the arena trying to fight unfairness with Ticketmaster and the bigger Music Houses. While they might not be everyones flavour musically, they are definately on of the bands trying to break molds with how their music is distributed. Maybe this is a little bittersweet, but damn good to see someone trying to get paid without ripping half the world off.
why wouldn't a band want people to share their videos? I could understand if they were a primary source of revenue for the band, but as far as I know they're not. These days it's not like someone's going to go to thr trouble of ripping the audio out of a video stream to obtain an illegal copy of the song (since there are other, easier ways to do that), so all in all it's just free publicity.
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
By releasing this for free I'm sure they would be missing out on some lost sales, maybe the RIAA will sue them.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
It's an interesting move, though in a way it feels a bit like they're jumping on the bandwagon. Of course, the bandwagon can always use some big names on it, right? The quality of the file is pretty nice, beats the usual tiny mpeg smattered with MTV and various other station logos, especially in the day of dumb animated logos and advertisments.
"Chubaca" ??? Who or what in the hell is that? If you meant CHEWBACCA from STAR WARS, may I have your nerd membership card back? We have several Star Wars nerds on standby to beat you inefectually with foam light sabers.
This is genius! If the concept of a video is to promote your album, why not make it free to distribute? I mean MTV isn't going to play it unless your target audience are preteens. And even then they'll only show 30 seconds of it with somebody saying something stupid like "OMG! Ponies!" in the background.
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
Thanks! That was EXACTLY what I was looking to watch JUST before hitting the sack at night :(
Thanks slashdot for giving me nightmares
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.
Did you LISTEN to that monstrosity, or just watch it with the volume muted? Surely Eddie V could have invested in an auto-tune plugin for his sequencer, at least...
More like... nerdular nerdence!
So sales are the most accurate mesurement of quality? Who knew that Kelly Clarkson and the Black Eyed Peas were so awesome?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
It could be two things
1)The realize that they already have enough money and now are just trying to let people listen to some music they make.
2)The record companies gets the feeling that the band/artist/whatever is likely to do this in the future. That's when the career ends.
Oh, and another thing. Pearl Jam's career really isn't dead. They're currently on tour. It looks like they even have double bookings for some stadium sized venues. As in they sold out a stadium... twice. That's pretty good for a "dead" band that is getting very little radio support on the tour.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
i fail to see what changes and conditions they added to the license they directly link to the creative commons copy of the license, format is debatable but what at all is wrong with google video where you can download the file also? you know its right there on the right of the video in the flash player.
Foam light sabers are so 8 hours ago, everyone is using Macbooks now.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
... but I don't think they took into account the fact that RMS doesn't like the Creative Commons. My guess is fans will avoid the video in droves for that reason alone.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I remember at least five: 1. Evenflow, 2. Alive, 3. Jeremy, 4. Animal, 5. Daughter. All 1992-1993 thereabouts, before MTV started becoming totally wussy. Damn I'm old. :(
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
In essence, video clips are just advertising, and based on that, this move would not qualify too much on the revolutionary side of things. But, if you think about it as a political statement, it's a very good thing to do in dark times like these. Think about how many folks are going to see such a license for the first time on their lifes. Think about all the fan-kids out there with garage bands that will start seeing open licenses as something cool. Think about how many media droids are going to need to educate themselves on the "open" movement to be able to write a comment on that. Of course, none of this could happen, but how can we know?
Your ad could be here!
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
If you exported it to a different format, you just violated your license agreement (CC licensing comes with a bunch of options, the band has opted to forbid modification/transformation/derivative works).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
They've also had excellent videos completely devoid of live performances, I'm thinking specifically of "Do the Evolution." Pearl Jam with Seth McFarlane animating the video. That might be my favorite video ever.
Except music videos aren't advertisements; how does adding a cinematic dimension to the musical content reduce it to advertising?
Music videos may be used to advertise the album, but so are the songs on the album when they're played on the radio or broadcasted elsewhere--does that the album itself an "advertisement"? Touring also helps sell albums--does that mean concert goers are just being suckered into paying for "advertisements"?
And just because you can't make money off of the video or create derivative works from it doesn't mean it's not free anymore. They're being a lot more generous with their work than most major artists and are setting a good precendent for others to follow. So stop skewing the situation just so you can make substanceless complaints.
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
get a clue, asshole
Shit, AC, after I've read this extremely informative and useful post of yours I got a clue and now I live a better, more meaningful life.
These shows are soundboard quality (pretty much the best you can hope for in a "bootleg") and completely DRM.
think you meant DRM free, but good to know.
HD Trailers
Pearl Jam just played a show here in Santa Barbara a few weeks ago. To be fair to the people living around there, they sold their tickets disciminating by zip codes on credit cards. If you didn't have a zip code that fell within their accepted proximity to where they played (santa barbara bowl) you would not be able to buy a ticket. A band that supports the cause and does things that make a lot of sense. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Pearl Jam because of this. Oh, they also make incredibly good music.
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
Here is a copy of the videos on a school server. Cheers.
What is that supposed to mean?
They produced a music video, as musicians sometimes do.
They released it under a Creative Commons license, which is rare.
This allows people to do rare things with a mainstream artist's creative content, like download it/enjoy it/distribute it for free.
Most artists would have prohibited the above mentioned activities in their license.
Thus, what Pearl Jam has done is interesting news for most of us, and it would benefit fans if other artists followed Pearl Jam's lead.
So what is there for you to possibly complain about? That they haven't sold many CDs at your store? What does that have to do with anything?
Do you have a coherent point to make, or did you just want to post incoherent ramblings?
I know some people don't like RMS, but he nailed this one for sure. Just look at the Slashdot headline for this article "Pearl Jam Releases Video Under Creative Commons"... lumping them all together just as RMS suggested people would. "Creative Commons" without describing the varient doesn't mean anything at all, yet that is the message the headline gives and a real problem with the suite of CC licenses. Certainly, people can specifiy which CC license you are talking about (as the body text of the slashdot article does), but it's still overly confusing.
Consider the analogous slashdot heading "Company Releases Program Under GPL" -- the GPL is a title that unlike CC has a specific meaning, if it's GPL you know what to expect whether you like that license or not. The problem with CC is really worse than the similarily vaguely defined label "open source" because some of the CC licenses are really quite restrictive.
I do understand what the people behind CC are trying to do, and I respect that. I just wish that they had put more effort into promoting the use of individual specific licenses instead of the CC 'brand'. GNU does this well, they have GPL, GFDL, LGPL as their own separate brand instead of just calling it a "GNU license" which doesn't convey the specificness those different concepts represent.
501 Not Implemented
Are you guys nuts?! This is a Sony BMG release; by exploiting a vulnerability in the handling of each video frame, simply playing this video in any format installs a rootkit :O
Correct, you can download Audioslave's video. And if you send it to your grandmother, no one will know. However: you say "videos are available to view for free a million places on the web." Most of these sites (from Youtube to ebaum) would be in violation of copyright to host that video, and will comply with a cease-and-desist rather than face legal action. "Guerilla hosting" is not reliable, as witnessed by the fact that, for every music video you can find surreptitiously hosted, there are fifty you can't.
The other aspect of GPL you've glossed over is "commercial use and derivatives." You can't wish copyright law out of existence; without this protection, General Dynamics gets to use Pearl Jam to sell nuclear warheads, maybe copyrighting its own rework of the lyrics en route. That would be disgusting.
From the horse's mouth: That is somewhat of a misunderstanding--we cannot "ban DRM". What we can do is prevent GPL-covered software from being corrupted into an instrument for implementing DRM. --Richard Stallman
As soon as you say any form of copyright is a good idea, your technical argument ("viewing creates a copy! bits and bytes!") becomes justification for the DMCA. Fair use and common sense become casualties of digital media.
Don't be a dweeb. Free Software are still the good guys.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Please tell me how there can be any point in trying to slashdot a school's server.
That's true, but the fact that they're even aware of a license that was created for the purpose of distributing man pages and wiki's and the likes tells you something.
You raise some interesting points. As background, what sort of artistic works have you produced, and how have you licensed them? Have you ever undertook something as big and costly as a music video, and then released it with less restrictive terms? In particular, has it been something related to your livelihood?
It's easy for us, as consumers, to state that creators should give away their stuff for free and unrestricted; and when they don't, it's also easy for us to rationalize ignoring others' copyrights. Kudos to you if you've created major works of art and given them away restriction-free -- and if you have, you know it's a pretty big and scary step.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
They offer downloads of their concerts in MP3 (and some in FLAC) format. And encourage sharing recordings of their concerts. Bypassing the greedy RIAA. www.pearljam.com