Can There Be Open Source Music?

Lemeowski writes "Cygnus Solutions co-founder Michael Tiemann takes an in-depth look at whether music can truly ever be open source. Leaning on his personal experiences of trying to convince the market that a company that provided commercial support for free software could be successful, Tiemann argues that similar to how 'the future of software was actually waiting for the fuller participation of users ... so, too, is the future of the art of music.' In his essay, Tiemann makes a case for open source music, from licensing for quality recordings to sheet music with notes from the original composer in an easy-to-reuse format, and he offers ways to get involved in making music open source." Apropos open source music, reader rDouglass adds a link to the Open Goldberg Variations project, last mentioned on Slashdot in 2012.

Comments

Of course there can.

[Sique]

It's called "Traditional" or "folk music".

Re:Of course there can.

[intermodal]

It's also called "the public domain". There's a reason we end up with so many forks of different traditional songs, and it's because people weren't subject to repercussions for simply playing music.

Re:Of course there can.

[rubycodez]

but the media cartel has extended copyright to ridiculous lengths of time to prevent music from becoming part of tradition or belonging to the people. the original reasonable limits had exactly that in mind.

Re:Of course there can.

[fustakrakich]

Anything that slows the distribution of Sonny Bono's music can't be all bad...

Yes, but

[Russ1642]

You'll only hear the cool intro, without the bass line because that's still in development, and only the first two verses are written. There should be some updates by the end of the year but we're not promising anything. The drum track is done with crappy open-source drum software but we're totally gonna get someone to record it for real as soon as we scrape together $50 to pay a drooler, I mean drummer. If you complain about the missing parts you'll just get yelled at for not making it yourself by teaching yourself to play the guitar.

My take

[matthewtift]

I led the effort within Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) to make radio history in 2012 when WPR broadcast the entire Open Goldberg Variations recording on air while simultaneously broadcasting the score on the Web. I think public media would provide a particularly good "home" for this kind of music. I'm fascinated by the idea of "open source music" and I've shared my thoughts about it on my blog, in various posts, such as: Public Music for Public Media: An Introduction, Open-Source Music: 10 More Reasons Why It Fits, and On the Role of Open-Source Music Scores.

Isn't This How It's Always Been?

[coaxial]

Open source isn't just free copying. That's just permissive licensing. The real power of open source is the ability to modify and share those modifications. That's always been the case in music.

See jazz.
See folk.
See hip-hop.
See country.
See blues.
See...

You were trying to be funny but... AAYSR

[RobertLTux]

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsMidi