p2pnet - rss feed: Indie labels lead the way
While what used to be the Big Five record labels and their mouthpiece, the RIAA, piss and moan about p2p file sharing and how tough things are, in the indie music world, things aren’t changing: they’ve already changed.
At one end of the music scale, Berklee College of Music, the world’s largest independent music college, has launched a groundbreaking program to offer free music lessons and is encouraging musicians to share and distribute them online through p2p file sharing apps.
And at the other, below are just a few examples of creative, lateral thinking:
* New York punk label Go-Kart Records is making mp3 work for it, as owner Greg Ross told the guys over at DownhillBattle. This October Go-Kart released several full albums free online, issued the GO-KART MP300 RACEWAY, a $10 mp3 CD with 150 bands and 300 songs, and trashed the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in an open letter.
* Magnatunes, out of Berkeley, California, is experimenting with Try before you Buy - the shareware concept applied to music. How did it come about?
Owner John Buckman’s wife released her CD on a British record label. "When my wife was signed to a British record label, we were really excited," says Buckman. "In the end, she sold 1000 CDs, lost all rights to her music for 10 years (even though the CD has been out of print for many years), and earned a total of $45 in royalties."
* A group of Seattle musicians and software developers think instead of trying to shut down file-sharing, people should be paid for it. So they dreamed up Weed - buy a file and then share it with someone else, who also buys it, and then …
* This December Warp Records will become the first company in the world to sell its music catalogue online without asking users to install proprietary software. It’ll combine its Bleep pay-per-track delivery with mp3 downloads.
* Another New York enterprise, Opsound, is using the the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license as, "an open source, copyleft model, an experiment in practical gift economics, a laboratory for new ways of releasing music".
Under it, anyone is, "free (and encouraged) to download works, make copies, share them, include them in other works, remix and rearrange them, and even sell them. The Attribution-ShareAlike license requires only that you attribute the works to their original authors/musicians (attribution), and that any derivative works (anything you make using the sound files) be licensed under the same license (share alike)."
* In Brighton, England, Loca Records is now also using Creative Commons for releases, "although we earlier had a go at writing a LOCA Public License, a derivative of the GNU Public License (GPL), it says. Why? "The multinational media corporations believe that music is a product to be squeezed of every last vestige of profit without any need to invest in new talent or to enable musicians to experiment.
"They do this by trying to enforce legal control using copyright law that give them ownership of music created by musicians in perpetuity. But they go much further in their attempts to control every derivative of the music, including samples, lyrics, melodies, rythmns and imagery. Anybody breaking their copyright is dealt with harshly and ruthlessly in the courts. When these companies have finally acheived their aims of preventing us from being able to create our own music we will live in a corporate world where we can be only consumers of music. In contrast, LOCA believes that creativity requires that musicians reappropriate and reinterpret music and sounds to enable them to create truly innovative music.
"LOCA believes that the fight over Free/Libre and Open Content and Media is a struggle over the freedom of expression and the freedom of speech, radically opening up the possibilities of media. To this end LOCA is attempting to release music under so-called copyleft, a license that enables music writers to develop music collaboratively and equitably and then release it into the public domain.
"Using these licenses LOCA hopes to provide the control necessary to prevent cynical exploitation of work that is released in this open way and to encourage others to do the same. We hope that musicians who contemplate using the work released in this manner will honour the license and release their work under a public license resulting in a radical rejection of the whole capitalist ethos of these multinational media corporations."
‘Underground’ is where the major labels are.
This is music that’s seen the light.
