Lots of good and very bad music :)
From a “free” perspective it would be even better if they encoded the music in a free format like ogg instead/also.
// 2tone
— 2tone 
Hi!
Check out http://www.jamendo.com for more free music (also available in ogg ;-)
regards
— sylv
Jamendo is extremely slick, thanks for the link. I especially like the search engine which allows you to search by licensing terms.
— Mark
Eh, they’re ok, but I’m still waiting for the revolutionaries to produce sound like Glósóli or Hjartað Hamast.
— Bob Aman
Mark,
Check also our site Simuze. It’s in Dutch but you can easily check the songs by license terms. There are almost 800 songs online in various genres.
Just visit this page (and you don’t have to read Dutch ;))
http://simuze.nl/live/artiesten/music_by_license.php
Current personal favorites:
http://www.simuze.nl/live/public/sicklow/mp3hi/Sickboys_and_Lowmen___Like_Pow___05___Sunny_Days.mp3
http://www.simuze.nl/live/public/thewalt/mp3hi/01_sir_well_meet_again.mp3
http://www.simuze.nl/live/public/detoffen/mp3hi/03_DE_TOFFEN_Koekhappers.mp3
ps: Thanks for all your books, your work is much appreciated!
— BjornW
@BjornW: thanks, that’s some good stuff. Haven’t listened to much so far, but I like Lennaert van Driel already.
— Mark
Mark, Opsound used to license all works under Creative Commons’ BY-NC-SA, and later removed the non-commercial condition. Are you including BY-NC-SA when you refer to these “more restrictive” licenses? I think the non-commercial condition has an important place in the so-called Free Culture Revolution, and here’s why.
Since Opsound’s change of CC license, I have been contacted far too often by commercial entities trolling through sites like Opsound, looking to cut their budget by scoring some free music for an upcoming project. I publish my e-mail address in the hope to make connections with other artists, not to see my hard work profit a company whose philosophy I disagree with. I feel that the removal of the NC condition facilitates commercial entities exploiting artists like this, and is therefore damaging to the ideal of Free Culture.
Personally, I’m much more inclined to waive the attribution, certainly the share-alike, conditions before the non-commercial.
— Scott
The short answer is yes, I count all Non-Commercial-Use-Only licenses as overly restrictive. Unfortunately, most published statistics I’ve seen (Flickr, cc.org) show a 2/3 majority of CC work is licensed for noncommercial use only. About 1/4 is marked as “no derivative works” at all. (These are not mutually exclusive groups; there is some overlap in the form of the CC-BY-NC-ND license.)
This is, in fact, one of my major beefs with the Creative Commons movement: they’ve created a brand that doesn’t really stand for anything except “copyright sucks, let’s be slightly less evil than those guys over there who are really screwing you.” By contrast, the two “brands” for code, Free Software and Open Source, both have well-articulated principles that define them. They define a baseline of freedom; some licenses provide different kinds of freedom for different parties above and beyond that baseline (GPL vs. BSD, etc. etc.), but they offer a baseline of freedoms. If you want to be a part of the open source community, you need to pick a license that affords those freedoms. One of the things that both camps agree on is that prohibiting commercial use is unacceptable (see, for example, #6 from the open source definition: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor).
This is not to say that scumbags coming along and profiting from your code is not also bad, but allowing people to restrict commercial use and still call their work “free” or “open” would be worse. I have personally had some of my open source code used in ways that I do not approve of, by people I do not approve of. It was difficult to accept, but I ended up deciding that it was more important to stay above that baseline than to try to use licensing terms as a weapon against the small small small minority of people who were using my work against me.
It is possible that the reasons for banning discrimination for code don’t translate well to the fields of music and art. See, for example, some commentary at Free Software Magazine: The case for a Creative Commons ’sunset’ Non-Commercial license module. But I’m not sure I buy that. I think the folks behind CC made a huge mistake in allowing such a wide spectrum of licenses under the “Creative Commons” umbrella. Not everyone is a license geek like me, nor do they spend a lot of time thinking about first principles. Most people glom onto a community and, when they produce something of their own, just pick a license to fit in, without giving it a lot of thought. (Nothing against artist types; I’ve known many programmers who chose a license that way too.) The fact that CC allows artists to restrict commercial use and still feel like they are “part of the community” is a missed opportunity of epic proportions.
This rant is nothing against you personally. You should choose a license you’re comfortable with, and God knows Creative Commons gives you plenty to choose from. But I read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and felt a wave of euphoria and optimism about the coming Free Culture Revolution. Then I looked at the license: yup, you guessed it, CC-BY-NC. Sigh. “The fish rots from the head,” etc. We may someday get that revolution he promised, but it won’t be led by a bunch of lawyers and pragmatists.
— Mark
@Mark
Thanks! Drop Lennaert van Driel aka DJ Sjors a note if you have the time I’m sure he will appreciate it :)
All the best,
grtz
BjornW
— BjornW
You’ve made two very interesting points, Mark.
The first is that, although scumbags may exploit a Free Software licensing model, this doesn’t warrant the added restriction of non-commercial use only. It might be evidence to show that the Free Culture model is fragile without a large supporting community, but making it a requirement of “free” licenses to thwart defecting parties defeats the purpose of Free Software in the first place.
Secondly, the reasons against commercial restrictions of Free Sofware do in fact apply to other fields like music. I have also published work under a GPL license, and so I’m strongly opposed to commercial-use restrictions of software licenses, but in any field the NC condition is simply a quick-fix for a deeper problem that should not be addressed within the license itself.
Although my priorities about which conditions I’d be most willing to waive has not changed, you have certainly convinced me that the non-commercial condition is too restrictive to be called “free”.
— Scott
I really, really want someone to give me an all-CC, all-the-time radio show- give me a stream of stuff I can listen to and explore, and do it from a variety of sites (so that I get pointers both to the artists and to the new ‘labels’.) I’d listen to that. But it would take a lot of work on someone’s part, I fear.