(photo via potatono)

Can you give us some background on blip.tv? When and why did it start up? Who’s involved? What is blip.tv’s purpose?

Blip.tv is a video hosting site that’s focused on shows. What that means is that we narrow our attention to independent content creators who make regular episodic shows on the web. We started in direct response to the needs of the emerging videoblogging community in 2005. Our purpose was to give shows an open platform from which they could build their own brand and identity online.

Unlike a lot of online video-sharing sites, blip.tv focuses on episodic content. What led you to this focus?

We focused on episodic content because we’ve always positioned blip.tv to be a pro-sumer tool for independent content creators. Because the community has grown from simple video diaries to web shows of every sort, we’ve grown with them.

blip.tv is distinct in that it has an interesting ad-revenue sharing model with content uploaders as well as distribution deals outside of the web. Can you elaborate on what this entails and share any illuminating anecdotes?

We view monetization and distribution all as part of the same whole, which is to provide the content creators with the best tools to keep making great shows. With advertising we allow shows to opt-in to our network of ad networks right from the first day. Once they build an audience we go to work with direct sponsorship sales. All revenue is split down right down the middle with the creators. Distribution is similar, we want to give a show as much exposure as possible be that on blip.tv, their own website, iTunes, or direct to the living room like with the Sony Bravia. It only helps us both. One of the most interesting lessons learned in my mind was how important building a destination site brand is to driving that exposure, which is one of the reasons why more of our focus has been there in recent months. Originally we thought of ourselves as merely a platform, whereas now we understand that in order to be effective we have to be both platform and destination.

The option to CC license is built into to blip.tv’s UI. Do you find that users utilize CC licensing often? What are the benefits users have in using CC licenses on blip.tv?

From the very beginning we’ve been big proponents of openness and sharing. We’ve never had licensing where we claim to own other peoples content, nor have we ever tried to obscure direct downloads of the original source material. CC plays a critical role in maintaining an open community from which everyone benefits. Nearly a quarter of the videos uploaded to blip.tv are under CC licensing. By allowing for sharing, re-mixing and re-sharing on the content creator’s own terms we provide more opportunity for shows to grow and build community.

CC Founder Larry Lessig has called blip.tv a “true” sharing site as it allows content creators the option to have their videos downloaded, enabling sharing and reuse. Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from users choosing CC licensing?

I think one of the most interesting CC experiences I’ve seen on blip.tv was early on, when Rudy Jahchan and Casey McKinnon, the brilliant minds behind Galacticast, created an episode titled “Node 666”. Members of the videoblogging community created clips which imagined themselves as survivors of a post apocalyptic earth and uploaded them to blip.tv under CC licensing. Rudy and Casey gathered and edited together the clips into to one of their most memorable episodes to date.

What’s next for blip.tv?

Next for blip.tv is to keep doing what we’ve been doing, which is building great tools for great video makers. We want to keep pushing independent show creators to the forefront until they are able to build sustainable businesses out of their creative talents. Part of that vision is to continue leveraging CC licensing to give content creators access to distribute and re-use great content.

(Indaba logo (c) Indaba Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved)

What’s Indaba Music all about? What’s its backstory? How did it come about? Who’s involved?

Indaba Music is an international community of musicians, from amateurs to Grammy-award winners, all mingling and making music together online. We came up with the idea for Indaba after starting a non-profit label in college as a means to provide new opportunities for student artists and give them greater exposure. That experience led us to bigger ideas - the two most exciting of which were 1) the way the connectivity of the internet has given artists increased access to fans (and vice versa) and to each other, and 2) the spread of cheap digital production technology (in the form of inexpensive but high quality software and hardware). To us, this meant that there were more people creating music than at any other point in history, and there was an exciting opportunity to connect these music-makers with each other and offer them new possibilities for collaboration and discovery. That’s ultimately what Indaba is - a place where artists meet and create new music.

How are you using CC licenses with Indaba Music? Which CC licenses are you using and why?

When Indaba members upload tracks to Sessions on Indaba, they can choose to reserve all rights, OR they can select a Creative Commons license. Artist rights are very important to us, and so this flexibility fits well with our mission to empower musicians. Indaba members can keep all their rights, or, thanks to Creative Commons, they can permit certain uses of their work by others. We’re using the CC Attribution 3.0 Unported license and the CC Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license - these licenses, along with the option to reserve all rights offer our members maximum flexibility.

We also host contests and promotions on our site in which we bring interesting opportunities to our community and enable them to collaborate with interesting material, big-name artists, and major brands (like the Leo Laporte Tech Guy Remix promotion that’s currently running on the site). Whenever possible we require that all submissions be licensed under Creative Commons so that these works can spread from Indaba out into the world (and also promote CC!).

Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from your choice of CC licensing? What benefits have you seen from using CC licenses?

One interesting instance of reuse occurred through a promotional contest we ran was with the Berklee College of Music. Grammy Award winner Joe Lovano and world renowned saxophonist Greg Osby (both Berklee alumni) worked via Indaba Music with four current Berklee students to create an original composition with each track licensed under Creative Commons. Our community was then invited to reuse the tracks and re-imagine the song in their own style. Creative Commons made this promotion possible because we were able to clearly communicate to these artists how their tracks would be used (and not used!) and, as a result, we were able to provide great some great jazz tracks that our community re-imagined in every style from techno to rock to reggae.

More generally, we have seen tremendous benefits from using CC licenses. Determining what certain audio tracks can be used for is complicated in the world of offline music production and is similarly complicated in the online world. CC licenses enable our members to be explicit about the permissions they grant to their collaborative partners and to the Indaba community at large without having to craft their own complicated legal arrangements. This flexibility is great for musicians, and when you combine it with Indaba’s ability to track every event that occurs within specific projects, it means that artists have more control over their work and the creative process than they ever had before.

What’s next for Indaba Music?

Indaba recently launched a redesign that makes the site more cohesive and easier to use, and over the next few months we’ll be launching additional features that enhance the collaborative experience and lower the barriers to entry even further for digital recording. We’ll also be bringing our members other tools that they’ve asked for, enabling them to do more with their music once they’ve created it on the site. It is important to us, not only for future of our company but for the future of the music industry, that we continue to provide new tools for independent musicians and promote artist-friendly resources like Creative Commons.

What’s vosotros all about? What’s its history? How did it come about? Who’s involved?

vosotros is a new music initiative and label founded by Chicago natives John Gillilan and Gabe Noel. Our latest project, The Lazy Susan, will be released this February. We first met in Professora White’s 7th grade Spanish class, which is where we got our name. Vosotros is a Spanish verb conjugation roughly meaning “you-all.” But since it is only used in Spain, it was always ignored. Vosotros is music for you-all.

The Lazy Susan was born in February 2007, when we assembled a band to record one song and launch our year-long residency in downtown Los Angeles. Each month during the next year, we assembled a new band to record another song and play another month of the residency. Twelve months later, vosotros presents: the lazy susan – an album featuring thirty-two musicians on twelve songs written by bassist Gabe Noel.

The Lazy Susan introduces music by “Noelsson Schmoelsson”, “Someone’s Piano”, “First Good Feeling”, “PB&J…and g”, “masunday”, “Saltar”, “My Moon Boots”, “The Carrot and Stick”, “Touhy”, “ump-off Pause Tape”, “How Long It Takes To Know”, and “Our Song”.

February 28 marks the one-year anniversary of our residency at LAND (details here) – and the release of our third album as a label. You can listen to the lazy susan at last.fm and iMeem. Also, be sure to check out this promo video crafted by our friend Dave McCary using only public domain footage.

How are you using CC licenses on this project? Which CC licenses are you using and why?

To date, we have released all of our work under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License, meaning that listeners are free to copy, transmit, and share our music for non-commercial purposes. This license was most appealing to us as a label because it offers the same rights as the “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0″ option - but in a way that is digestible for the casual music fan. In this critical growth period for Creative Commons, we believe it is important to present these concepts as simply and directly as possible to our listeners.

What’s next for Vosotros?

Lots! We’ve mapped out most of our release schedule through the end of 2008 and we have studio time booked starting the day after the lazy susan release show for our next project! And now that we have a few albums under our belts, we’re eager to start releasing music by some of our friends. Also expect some live performances from Quiet Orchestra. Stay tuned….

What is your background? Can you catch up our readers on the various projects you are involved in, from your writing to your podcast?

I am primarily known as a science fiction writer but I write in many genres, including mainstream or literary fiction, slipstream, fantasy and mystery. I’ve written five novels, about eighty short stories as well as poems, plays, essays and even a planetarium show. I’ve had some gratifying recognition for my work: two Hugos, a Nebula and a Locus Award. I’ve been churning out a column about science fiction and the internet at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for more than ten years now. Back in 2004 I had a chance to be there pretty near the birth of podcasting. I was being interviewed by Dave Slusher and he tried to explain what it was and why it was so cool. But I was too dense to wrap my mind around podcasting just then, so it wasn’t until the fall of 2005 that I started Free Reads, which is my CC podcast. That led to James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible.com, which is a for-pay podcast. But enough about me — if for some reason you lust for more Jim Kelly propaganda, check out my website jimkelly.net.

How have you been using CC licenses? Which CC licenses are you using and why?

I went to Clarion, a science fiction writers workshop, with Bruce Sterling back when we were both knee high to an adverb. Bruce and I have stayed in contact over the years and when he started giving his book, THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, away in the mid ’90’s, I was paying close attention. At that time I had a plain vanilla hand-crafted website and I began to post stories that had already come and gone in various science fiction magazines for people to read for free. This was way before CC, so I just posted the following at the gateway to my archive:

“Please don’t charge anyone for anything you find here without my expressed permission. Many of these pieces are copyrighted; I have not put them into the public domain. If you paid for any of them and they weren’t in a book or a magazine, I’d like to know. The person who sold them to you may have cheated both of us. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep anything you take from here in as close to its original format as you can. Don’t make changes — even if they are improvements — to my writing. And don’t plagiarize this stuff. It would be bad for your literary karma.”

It’s pretty amazing how close that is to the CC license 3.0, which is what I currently use!

Sixteen years after I went to Clarion as a student, I went back to teach in the program and have been doing it regularly ever since. The second time I taught I had the tremendous good fortune to have Cory Doctorow as a student. He’s been teaching me ever since and he was the one who turned me on to CC. It took me all of a nanosecond to realize that this was the best thing since the invention of the backspace key.

I teach popular fiction at the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine and one of the things I continually try to impress on my students (and fellow professionals) is that real writing needs readers. Consider the old philosopher’s chestnut: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to hear it, does it make a noise? Now tweak it to writing: If a story gets published in a magazine and two years later nobody can put their hands on the magazine, is the story still published? I would argue that it is not. So get it reprinted, yes? No. The problem is that traditional publishing isn’t be all that interested in yesterday’s stories. So, I tell my students, if you want your published stories to become slowly unpublished, go ahead and leave them in the dark of your desk drawer. Me, I’m going to use the CC license and get my stuff under the light of reader’s eyes. And … um … in their ears.

So far on my Free Reads podcast I’ve posted two novels, LOOK INTO THE SUN and BURN, in their entirety, as well as a handful of stories and a number of my columns “On The Net” from Asimov’s.

Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from your choice of CC licensing? What benefits have you seen from using CC licenses?

Making best use of the CC license has led to two of the highlights of my career. In 2005 I published a novella called BURN with Tachyon Publications, a small press that gave me a small press print run of about three thousand. I was able to convince my editor to let me podcast the book, a chapter a week for sixteen weeks, beginning right around the pub date. Many, many, many more thousands listened to the CC licensed BURN than read it. I was astonished when it was a finalist for the Hugo and won the Nebula. It’s funny, but on the announcement from the Science Fiction Writers of America for the award, it was listed as a podcast rather than a book. Some have claimed it was the first podcast to win a Nebula, and I suppose that’s so. It certainly is the first CC licensed work to win a Neb. Would my little novel have gotten this kind of recognition had I not given it away for free? I don’t think so.

About a year into Free Reads I got an email out of the blue from Audible.com, the largest online seller of audiobooks. They said that they had been tracking Free Reads and were interested in working with me on a for-pay podcast project. This gave me a huge kick, because I was one of the earliest adopters of Audible. I love listening to audiobooks when I jog and garden and drive and potter around the house. We eventually closed a deal for me to record fifty-two stories for them for what came to be called StoryPod. Some of the stories they were interested in were already posted on Free Reads and part of our negotiations centered around how we could keep them available for free and at the same sell them on Audible. The folks at Audible proved to be flexible on this point; I think they recognized that satisfied listeners of Free Reads would be tempted to sample StoryPod, so all the stories stayed up.

What is next on your radar?

A friend and I recently redesigned my website to make downloading my CC licensed writing even easier. Now you can click an icon to print it or to email to yourself or a friend. I’m intending to post more stuff up there soon. Meanwhile, I have just signed up with Daily Lit, which is a service that will email you novels in thousand word chunks. They have a mix of free CC licensed and for pay fiction. They now have BURN. And I have a new short story collection coming out from Golden Gryphon Press in July called THE WRECK OF THE GODSPEED. Many of the stories that will appear in it are already posted on my site under the CC license.

Give us some background about your music and your history playing music.

I started out playing in bands in the late 90s with genres ranging from hardcore punk to Latin and everything in between. Around 2001, I felt pretty jaded with the whole band thing and started to look for a more creative way to make music that would be an alternative to the usual route of getting signed, touring, and having a hit single. I started messing around with the idea of writing whole albums with a central theme and having a freeform collective of musicians instead of a formal music group. This is where the ‘Galactic Defender of the Concept Album’ idea came about.

How did you hear about CC?

I heard about Creative Commons during a SXSW panel on digital distribution. Prior to this panel, I wasn’t really sure how to get these concept albums out there. I’d burn them to a disk, make a couple copies and hand them out to friends. Since hearing about Creative Commons, I’ve released every album under CC license for free download on archive.org.

Why did CC appeal to you?

With Creative Commons licenses, I have the ability to distribute albums freely to anyone in the world without the need for a distributor and without worrying that someone could be using the songs outside of their intended purpose. I couldn’t do what I do without Creative Commons.

Which license do you use for your work and why did you select that license?

I use the Non-Commercial, Attribution, and Non-Derivative. With this license, I have the ability to maintain control over any public display of the works in order to keep the central idea of what I do there. I choose Non-Derivative to keep my collaborators happy and assure them that what we write is final when we say it is.

Have there been any interesting stories that have come out of your use of CC licenses?

A whole lot of downloads. It always interests me what albums people download most. Right now the most downloaded album is “New American Songbook” which is a collection of songs about the many facets of America and American life. Music from the albums has been used in films, student projects and podcasts all over the world.

What are some of the current and future projects you have planned?

Of course, to keep recording concept albums! I’ve been recording at least one concept album a year. I’d also like to continue to explore how this plays out in other forms of media. Right now I’m working on how to do it in the performance setting. Down the road perhaps the albums can include art, poetry, and film. Or maybe even interpretive dance! Well, maybe that takes it too far. But you get the where I’m going with this. It’s all about the big idea.

What’s BloodSpell/Strange Company all about? What’s its history? How did it come about? Who’s involved?

Strange Company is the world’s oldest professional Machinima (real-time 3D filmmaking using computer game engines or similar tools - basically puppetry on a computer) production company - we’ve been around since 1997, when I quit pursuing a computer science degree to go play with this new “Quake Movies” thing. It turned out to be a better idea than it looked - we’ve been making films for 10 years now and havve been praised by Pulitzer winner Roger Ebert, worked for some of the most respected companies in the world (like the BBC and BAFTA), and have’ve produced some fantastic films.

BloodSpell is a feature-length Machinima film, one of the few that have ever been made. It’s what we’re calling a “punk fantasy” - an epic fantasy film about a world where people are infected with magic in their blood, but without all of the pompousness, “Olde Worlde” feel and posh English accents that most fantasy films feel they have to have.

BloodSpell happened because we’d been spending a while trying to develop a really huge film project, and we’d kinda lost sight of what makes Machinima great - the fact that it’s fast and cheap enough to make a Machinima film that you can just do it. A collaborator of mine pointed out, in his inimitable way, that we had “lost the punk edge”. So we promptly turned around and decided to put together a fast, cheap film.

Of course, then mission creep set in. But four years later, we’re very proud of the result, and the response we’ve had - praise from major newspapers (The Guardian and USA Today), top interweb/storytelling types (like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow), and great reviews all across the world.

How are you using CC licenses with BloodSpell? Which CC licenses are you using and why?

BloodSpell is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Essentially, we chose CC for brutally commercial reasons - we weren’t going to make money with BloodSpell (it’s basically the world’s largest market research project), we knew that basically every first feature film doesn’t make its creator money, no matter how it’s licensed, and we wanted to make sure that as many people as possible got to see it. From that standpoint, CC was a no-brainer. Likewise, there was no reason to limit the uses people make of our work - I’d love to see BloodSpell fan-fiction, for all that I probably can’t read it myself for legal reasons.

Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from your choice of CC licensing? What benefits have you seen from using CC licenses?

Actually, we’ve not seen a lot of reuse and remixing, although a couple of people have done some very cool fan-art and remixed trailers. The major benefit we’ve seen is simply that people know they’re free to watch and give away BloodSpell, and that’s made us very popular - to the extent that we’re currently the second most watched Scottish feature film this year, on a budget that’s more than 100 times lower than the next most watched film!

What’s next for BloodSpell/Strange Company?

We’ll be releasing a BloodSpell DVD pretty soon - also under CC - and we’re going to be working on developing tools and technology for our next productions.

The other thing I’m likely to be doing is helming a CC cookery show called “Kamikaze Cookery”, teaching people to cook using modern, molecular gastronomy techniques, but that’s a different story…

What’s OnClassical all about?

OnClassical is an online label for refined music. The name means both ON(line)CLASSICAL(music) and ON[about]CLASSICAL[music]. I define “classical” in the same way that Wiktionary does, “of or relating to the first class, especially in literature or art” or, “that which designates a kind and forms a base.”. Of course we concern ourselves only with music, not with the other arts. Our aim is to publish music that is deeply rooted in the culture of music at its truest level, including music that is innovative or the fruit of improvisation.

The philosophy of OnClassical brings together not only quality compositions and performances, but also quality recordings that we either produce ourselves or carefully select from the submissions we receive. We recently chose to define onclassical.com as the “online label for audiophiles,” in large part due to a review by premier piano manufacturer Boesendorfer, in which a recording of ours was defined as “very excellent” (PDF available here).

The label proposes “a new way to think about music.” This means music with no packaging that is distributed via the Internet. OnClassical shares profits 50/50 with artists, and requests no fees or exclusive agreements to join. Besides this, the level of quality in its published performances and recordings is very high and for this reason it is not easy to become one of OnClassical’s featured artists.

What’s is OnClassical’s background?

OnClassical was born in 2002 with the name OnFugues (the onclassical.com domain was acquired after April 30, 2003). Not long before I had given birth to kunstderfuge.com, a free MIDI website that also provided a database for MP3s with pages dedicated to musicians. I began by sending out invitations to musicians who were winners of international competitions. This resulted in me receiving various discs from which I extracted pieces to publish online. I immediately began to experience the problem tied to artistic and technical selection. I thus decided to be fairly “clement,” which meant publishing one disc every two or three received. I wondered, however, how useful it was to give space to just about everything when the rest of the web was already doing the same thing (for example, with MySpace).

Starting from what I viewed as the second version of the site, beginning on the 14th February 2005 (coincidentally, on St. Valentines Day of 2007 I also launched CLASSICA(land)), I applied a further degree of selection to the material. The idea for increased selection came primarily from wanting to feature albums over single audio files.

Still not happy, in January 2007 I decided to begin cataloging again from zero. This final selection left me with just 4 discs out of the nearly 200 I had been sent by artists — about 2%! The rest was made up by my own recordings. This brings us to the renewed launching of onclassical.com, dated July 2007.

How or why did you begin?

Through buying discs from various recording houses, I began to see a low degree of selection in both an artistic and technical sense. As a rather meticulous sound technician I understood that the “little recording houses” often went hand in hand with “poor quality.” In fact, in Italy - and in the world - there is an abundance of recording houses, many of which are very small, often with catalogs which seem put together by chance. Similarly, the artists released by these recording houses were not always top talents, and were willing to pay for the publicity. Clearly, there are recording houses that are willing enough to take advantage of the situation.

With OnClassical I wanted to avoid all this, and concentrate on absolute quality in both performance and recording. Each recording is listened to carefully at least 50 times before it is published in an effort towards high recording standards. For this, OnClassical can be compared to a little shop of a craftsman in an era of standardization.

Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from your choice of CC licensing? What benefits have you seen from using CC licenses?The advantages of using Creative Commons, united to the logic of quality music, became immediately noticeable. At the end of October, for example, OnClassical was officially invited by Dr. Flavia Marzano of QuiFree and the Region of Tuscany to participate in the International Festival of Creativity alongside Wikipedia, Ubuntu, and other important names. Amidst the 350,000+ visitors at the Festival I must say we were received very well. Despite the many distractions (lights, colors, and shows of all sorts) people were truly interested and stopped to hear our music (as well as to inquire about Creative Commons).

We were also contacted by a London-based label on the look-out for a catalog of classical music, who was interested in our artists. However, I preferred to decline, explaining that with OnClassical, the hope is to present the musicians only within a frame that is in keeping with their style. In the end, I believe that if onclassical.com is given worthy recognition on the web, and hopefully even outside the web, it will be due to the care we take in selecting out artists, music, and recordings.

Do you have anything else under CC licenses?

Graphics, images, texts and the new sleeves are covered by CC. It should be noted that all our sleeves can be downloaded even without having bought the relevant discs in high fidelity sound.

What’s next for OnClassical? What about new artists?

So far we have been dedicated entirely to classical music, but in the near future we will be devoting space to other types of refined music, such as electronic music, jazz, and cross-over.

Furthermore, we will soon be adding the historical group Don Kosaken Chor, a famous American choir with Orthodox origins that began in Greece in the early 1920s, to our catalog. The choir had sang in almost all the big concert halls of the world until its dissolution in 1979, accumulating about 10,000 performances and various recordings, including some with Deutsche Grammophone. The Don Kosaken soloists made a comeback in 1991, and are now directed by one of their former singers, Wanja Hlibka. The recording at onclassical.com will be their only disc with this new formation.

We will also be featuring artists who have recorded with labels such as Decca, EMI, and Deutsche Grammophone. I think that speaks for itself. We hope the public and the critics will grant us recognition for our professionalism.

My effort is now spent spreading news of onclassical.com so that as many people as possible can learn about us. I’m doing this through opening up relations with other companies and music magazines (that are usually more interested in the CD package). What I hope to help them to understand is that it is absurd to keep on thinking about music packaged only on a CD. In the 21st century, we need to realize the limited use of CDs, which can be produced easily at home, and to realize that the Internet is offering us amazing possibilities to easily distribute high-fidelity music in a manner that we define as “a new way of thinking about music.”

What’s Jamglue all about? What’s its history? How did it come about? Who’s involved?

Jamglue aims to make it simple and fun for fans to get involved with the music they love. Our Flash-based tools let anyone mash up and remix music from within their browser, making their mark on their favorite music.

Our tools and rapidly growing online community provide a platform for artists to engage their listeners. Through remix contests, fans can interact with their music by adding/removing parts, chopping up tracks, contributing their own vocals, and adding sound effects. Our community facilitates collaboration and provides an instant audience for the new music that’s produced.

Jamglue is run and maintained by its three founders: Gautam Jayaraman, Casey Muller and myself. The story began when Gautam and Casey were in a band together in college, then after graduation in 2003, moved to distant cities. They got excited about distance musical collaboration, as well as applying an “open source” model to music production — putting it into the hands of many and making it less of a closed art form. This sparked the initial idea for Jamglue, and the idea continued to evolve as we began building the site in June 2006 and launched the following December.

The original, raw version of Jamglue was designed to make it easy for musicians to collaborate over the internet. As the idea evolved, we saw that these tools were perfect not only for musicians, but also for their fans to play around with the music, learn more about how it fits together, and personalize it to make it their own. Today the Jamglue community has over 75,000 members engaging in a creative dialogue with their favorite artists, as well as each other, to create hundreds of thousands of original remixes.

How are you using CC licenses on this project? Which CC licenses are you using and why?

Jamglue is basically a huge library containing two types of music: tracks and mixes. A track is an audio file that a user has uploaded, and a mix is a collection of tracks that have been chopped, layered and arranged together using our Flash-based remixing tools.

Our users apply CC licenses to the tracks they upload as well as the mixes they create online. This way everything in the library is remixable, i.e. anyone can use anyone else’s stuff in their own mixes. Without CC it would be very difficult to give users the flexibility they deserve while keeping it simple to use. We support five CC licenses, so users can add NonCommercial or ShareAlike stipulations as they see fit. At the same time, Jamglue automatically enforces compatibility rules between different licenses, so that in most cases the licensing “just works” and users can focus on the creative aspects of making music.

Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from your choice of CC licensing? What benefits have you seen from using CC licenses?

Some of the most exciting reuse has occurred when artists release popular songs for their fans to remix. Under a CC license, the artist provides the studio stems (i.e. separate tracks for different instruments, etc.), giving fans and remixers incredible creative freedom. We’ve had people trading verses with major artists, rapping and singing, and we’ve had skilled DJs who take a hit song and completely rework it with fresh beats they made. And this is a win-win situation where the artists and labels benefit as well- they get to publicize their song and engage fans on a deeper level, while protecting their creative property and making sure it’s not reused commercially.

It’s been gratifying how receptive artists have been to the idea of Jamglue. We’re constantly getting approached by artists who understand that fans don’t just want to sit on the sidelines and passively listen to music. We’ve already held remix contests with T-Pain, Public Enemy, R. Kelly, Jars of Clay, and several up-and-coming artists, all of whom share in our vision of bringing remixing to the masses.

What’s next for Jamglue?

We would love to become the place that every artist promotes their new music through remixing. We’re planning several more remix contests over the next few months, as well as adding features to better support our growing community of remixers, singers and rappers. As our community grows, we are finding more and more talented young fans who are making fantastic music on Jamglue; we are hoping to find ways to really showcase and recognize this talent, and eventually become a destination for music consumers looking for original, CC licensed music by rising stars. We’re really excited that Jamglue is starting to build a strong identity, especially in genres like hip-hop and R&B where remixing, sampling, and collaboration are part of the DNA; we’re listening hard to our users, artists, and record label partners, and hope to continue to blur the line between musician and fan!

The idea for BeatPick came from founder David d’Atri’s Masters in Business Economics thesis. BeatPick made its public debut in February of 2006. As of October 2007, BeatPick represents around 120 artists with over 3,000 music tracks. In addition to BeatPick’s London base, the company has recently opened an office in Rome, Italy as a result of being partially acquired by an Italian software company.

Creative Commons’s former general counsel Mia Garlick caught up with BeatPick.com founder David d’Atri earlier this year to learn more about the company, its artists, its business model, and how it uses Creative Commons licenses to achieve its goals.

It requires quite some determination to take something from a Masters project to a real live business; what was the driving force that lead you to turn BeatPick into a reality?

As a young adult, I was involved in setting up a small label: we specifically did not put a copyright warning on our vinyl and did not pay the collecting societies which we were not members of anyhow. Later on, we began to encourage people to download our music for free from our website. We felt that this was an acceptable way of getting known and making money.

During my studies, I began investigating if whether or not by relaxing the rigid existing copyright laws and decriminalizing file sharing, the music market could become truly competitive. I was also increasingly interested in finding out if it was possible to devise new business strategies that were radically different from traditional ones.

After having completed my MSC, I was hired at a small record label in London where I acquired some practical experience in music licensing. I soon realized that I wanted to replicate the model I had previously used with my old label but on a larger scale. I was curious if I could come up with my own system, something that would provide me with a secure legal framework; that’s when I found out about Creative Commons. I suppose it was discovering the much-debated issues with Creative Commons that really encouraged me to embark on a project like BeatPick.

BeatPick describes itself as a “FairPlay” music label. What does this mean?

In a nutshell, “FairPlay” music label means that with our system we cut out many of the costs associated with traditional record labels; trying to re-balance the position of the artists and the public vis-à-vis the label. More specifically, this means that we have been trying to develop a system that is:

1. Fairer to the public because it allows people to try before they buy, as well as pay a low price in order to download the music in a variety of high to perfect quality digital formats. BeatPick.com also encourages music sharing and allows music to be re-downloaded after it has been bought.

2. Fairer for businesses because they get quick and easy access to music licensing prices and contracts, and have an accessible system with which to license music day or night. They also have transparent access to music licensing with equal prices for all artists, haggle-free.

3. Fairer for the artists because they sign a non-exclusive agreement that can be terminated anytime, receive 50% of any earnings on their music, are not forced to sign obscure and unfavourable contracts, benefit from free advertisement for their creations and they get their music in film/tv and other commercial projects.

4. Last but not least, BeatPick.com runs a fair system that encourages millions of students, soon-to-become professionals, amateurs, DJs and professionals, to use music for free in their non-commercial projects. We love people who remix, podcast or create multimedia projects with our music and disseminate it on the web. We believe this is truly a resource for innovation and sharing of information, as well as a key in assisting our business and increasing the earnings of our artists.

5. Fairer for store owners: we are launching a pilot project in Italy under which public and private spaces will be able to acquire the right to diffuse our music in their premises without having to pay the collecting societies (SIAE in Italy). We have ratified an agreement with FIIS (Italian Federation of the Sport Centres) which will present their members with two membership options: web radio or external hard disk with music manager software. This is the first time in Italy that a private company becomes a direct competitor of SIAE therefore liberalising a market. It seems fairer that public and private spaces have an option to choose the organisation that offer the service most appropriate to their needs. Owners of large public and private spaces can save up to 70% on SIAE fees.

How does BeatPick select the artists it represents? Do you focus on specific genres? How do artists hear about your label?

We have a couple of people here at BeatPick.com that listen to music all day long short-listing the most interesting artists. Then we get together and decide which artists we would like to represent - it’s pretty democratic really. We do not feel that only one person should decide; that would not be very fair towards the musicians or our business.

We try dealing with all music genres, from very rare and distant world music to very experimental glitch music and passing through the most popular genres such as rock, pop, hip hop and dance. We are not doing classical at the moment but are planning to expand into that genre this year after we have cut a few partnership deals with some Opera houses in Italy.

Artists hear about us via MySpace and other social networking sites, via word of mouth, via podcasts, blogs, and search engines. Mainly they hear about us via the Internet.

Tell us a little bit the BeatPick business model. How are your deals structured? How do BeatPick’s artists and how does BeatPick itself make money?

We split earnings 50/50 with artists or labels. Our agreement with them is non-exclusive and can be terminated anytime.

However, we see that the core of our business lies in the music licensing side of things. Professionals listen to our music, then pick which works best for their production and they are only just a few clicks away from getting a legal contract and WAV file for the music they have chosen. We also help professionals with no time to search for the music they need. They send us an email with their request and in a few hours they are emailed a link to download a number of songs to choose from. Once they have decided on a tune they write back to us and we send back a licensing agreement via email. We also provide clients with access to our catalogue free of charge. They get access to our ftp and from there they can download anything they want. They can simply download over 3000 tracks divided by genre to their hard disk. We are also planning to offer membership deals and supply clients with a hard disk full of music.

We also sell digital downloads: people listen to music for free, decide what to buy, pay and with a few clicks they get a digital download in WAV, MP3 and OGG. However, pay for music downloads is not very popular and we are deciding to experiment with different business models. It is very likely that a brand new version of BeatPick.com will offer different solutions.

In order to make our earnings (and those of the artists) more secure and stable, we are cutting offline deals in Italy to diffuse music in gyms, hotels, and book shops. The idea is having them to pay us an annual fee for the right to play our music. Our fee would substitute the fee they should pay to the Italian collecting society (more details later in this interview).

We are also very near to cutting a deal with a worldwide music channel leader for a project in Italy. This will possibly mean extra earnings for our artists and great visibility. More info on this project later on, but the very important thing is that we are finding it easier than we expected to find large companies who are interested in a fairer business model, independent music, and Creative Commons.

How did you hear about Creative Commons? What attracted you to the idea of using CC licenses in the BeatPick model?

I cannot recall exactly how I first heard about CC. It was at the beginning of 2003, and Creative Commons had begun to be featured more prominently on the net. It could have been by word of mouth or I may have just wandered onto it. Creative Commons was the inspiration for BeatPick.com and not the contrary. I thought that it was the perfect legal framework for the label I wanted to create: it would give us the possibility to decide which rights to grant and which to retain on our music.

Why did you choose the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license?

We believe it is the best CC license for businesses because it balances the need to make a living with the need for advertisement. It helps to get your music noticed via sharing, remixing, and use in non-commercial projects without losing the possibility to earn money from people that are willing to pay for your music. This license applies perfectly to us and has allowed us to create our business as it is.

Have you had any reaction from artists or the general public or others in the industry to your use of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license?

One of the most difficult things is to help people see that Creative Commons applies on copyright and is not a substitution for copyright. Many artists fear that people are going to be able to do anything with their music and that the artist will lose ownership of their creations. However, we find that most people – artists and public alike – become very enthusiastic when we explain what we are exactly trying to achieve with Creative Commons. Under the Creative Commons licenses, the artists are empowered to decide what to do with their music, depending on the needs of the artists rather than the rules and regulation of traditional copyright. In contrast, managers and label owners are often against Creative Commons, possibly because they have been in the music industry for so long, making them unwilling to change what has been successful for them over the years. They also maybe unable to keep up with the changing forms of copyright or are just not willing to adapt. We do deal with record labels but we often prefer to speak directly to the artists. Businesses seeking to license music do not seem too interested: they just want good quality music, as quickly as possible, with as little bureaucracy as possible and with a legit legal agreement that will protect them from any possible litigation. In contrast, as mentioned earlier, we are finding large companies who are interested in our business model, specially those companies that are not in the traditional music market.

BeatPick has had some fantastic successes over the past year in having its artists included in major music promotions and projects, such as the Mercedes Mixtape competition and the Nokia for Music awards. Tell us about these and other cool projects that BeatPick artists have participated it.

The Mercedes Mixtape Competition was a good result for four of our artists that were selected. It has allowed them to promote their music to a vast audience as well as gain attention from many industry insiders. An agent working for Mercedes approached us and liked our business model and our music selection. They short-listed a number of songs from our music catalogue and then selected Foley and Napolitano Lounge Connection for Mixtape 14, Cris Tanzi for Mixtape 15, and Sean Haefeli for Mixtape 17.

Speaking of commercial licenses, we have recently sold ten tracks from different artists, including the beautiful voice of Nell Bryden, the brilliant tunes of OHN, and one of our frequently licensed trip hop bands, Sleeve Channel, to Original Marines for their Autumn collection video presentations that will be screened across their 500 retail franchises in Italy. Il Tempo, an Italian daily paper, born in 1948 that presses over 50,000 copies every day, has licensed a piano solo from our artist Galdson for an ad that will be screened in underground metro stations in Rome. The Travel Channel has licensed our artist Mole for a TV ad and the Airport of Rome has used music by Keister and Mr. Tunes. We have also participated in some high-profile fashion shows in Italy and several small to mid size creative businesses are licensing the music they need at BeatPick.com.

Furthermore, we encourage video artists and our musicians to collaborate, helping them to work together on new projects as well as use our music for free for non-commercial projects: a good example is our Tobor Experiment collaborating with Hfr-lab for an audio/video installation at the onedotzero festival. The collaboration then developed into a TV show which is aired on Qoob Tv (MTV Italia). Another of our artists, Autobam, recently collaborated with visual artist Quayola and went on to win the MTVbloom contest. We though those musicians could work well with some of the visual artists we know, so we put them in touch.

We are also partnering up with several festivals and universities. The Department of Science of Communications at the University of Rome, “La Sapienza” (the largest university in Europe), has asked one of our representatives to teach a series of lectures and workshops to their MSc program of Marketing and Managing about how we market and manage our music. At the end of the series of lectures, the university will propose to BeatPick two of their students for a three month internship. The project has gone well and we have recently hired one of our interns for a full-time position at BeatPick.com. The university has asked to renew the program in 2008.

We are keen on promoting our artists in all directions and we often spend time signing them up for competitions with out any possibility to earn money ourselves. We try to act as their managers as well as simple distributors of their music. Some other competitions, such as Nokia for Music awards and the Global Battle of the Bands, were simply advertised and supported by BeatPick.com. The artists who participated in these competitions have won a lot of popularity due to their unique talents, which in some cases has even brought them good earnings: Heavy Mojo won 100 thousand dollars and a world tour. Unfortunately we have now lost Heavy Mojo who have recently signed to Universal. Good Luck Mojo!

Can you talk a little about BeatPick.com’s recent partial acquisition by an Italian software company? How did they respond to your use of a CC license? What attracted them to make the investment in BeatPick.com?

One day I received a phone call from the boss of this software house asking to meet with us. They had noticed BeatPick entering the Italian market and wanted to expand their business to music, video, and cartoons. We were really suspicious and never considered selling any shares of our little company, especially not to an unknown person. As it turned out, we found a bunch of really nice people in a very active working environment who were strong supporters of the open source movement, as well as fans of Creative Commons. They were simply happy to find a music label working with an open source attitude. We were in talks for two or three months, trying to work side by side on a few projects in order to see if we could interact and trust each other. We then decided that it was a good opportunity for both teams and we went ahead with forging a deal. With this partner, we have created a non-profit organization that will attempt to inform Italian artists about copyright, Creative Commons, and what collecting societies can and cannot do. This will be done via the Web, traditional press, conferences, live events, and political tribunes. The deal has also allowed BeatPick.com to expand by opening an office in Rome, Italy and in hiring extra employees.

Furthermore, if all goes as it should, BeatPick.com will be launching a brand new website with many new features. We do, however, intend to stick to our ethos and will always pay our artists 50% of the earnings, will always offer non-exclusive contracts that can be terminated anytime, and we will always operate under a Creative Commons license (although we might eventually be open to other types of CC licenses).

What’s Strayform all about? What’s its history? How did it come about? Who’s involved?

Strayform is a new model for digital content. With the internet, distribution of digital goods is practically free; the true value is in their creation. Strayform allows people to pay for creation and lets distribution happen naturally and without restriction. Furthermore when you cut out middlemen who act as distributors, something amazing happens. Creators and consumers can now interact naturally as partners. No longer are you a passive recipient of a CD or film. With Strayform, you helped fund it, you watched it grow, you worked with the creator, you had input and could affect the final product. I believe because of this interaction the future will be full of all sorts of creative media projects that are not even imagined today.

I am the founder and I got the idea while working in Japan. My sister and I used to argue about piracy. She claimed that it hurts the artists while I said every dollar you pay to the big distributors is used to force artists into unfair contracts. About that time my friend’s band signed a multi-million dollar deal with EMI. But EMI sat on the contract and my friend went bankrupt. So I came up with an idea that cuts out the distributor, lets artists get paid more, and lets consumer use and file-share freely. I moved back to Texas and made the product, afterward moving to San Francisco to launch. In comparison to our competitors we are a tiny, boot-strapped team - a couple of guys in a coffee shop eating ramen to stay afloat. However, the site is quite sophisticated in what it does.

How are you using CC licenses on this project? Which CC licenses are you using and why?

CC Licenses are at the core of Strayform. All content produced and uploaded through Strayform is licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5. This provides freedom and ease-of-use to consumers, while creators gain an enthusiastic network of people eager to distribute their works. We supplement this with custom licensing for commercial use and remixing to give additional revenue opportunities for creators. This mix of sharing and payment for commercial use provides maximum value for creators and society as a whole.

3. Can you talk about any interesting instances of reuse that have arisen from your choice of CC licensing? What benefits have you seen from using CC licenses?

Without Creative Commons, Strayform could not exist. It is only thanks to the tireless efforts of the Creative Commons team and their supporters over the past several years that Strayform has been able to move forward. In return, by moving money away from traditional closed content and into CC licensed content, I hope Strayform provides the fuel that propels Creative Commons forward to be the de facto copyright license.

What’s next for Strayform?

Long-term, Strayform has three big goals:

1. Further empower artistic creators with additional service offerings that put them at the center of the value chain.

2. Expand Strayform’s “fund-create-release” platform to scientific and academic research so that this valuable knowledge is spread more openly and efficiently and its creators are better rewarded financially.

3. Initiate various projects which capitalize on a world abundant with CC licensed content.