Free Online Music Booms as SoundClick Offers Creative Commons Licenses

Matt Haughey, August 11th, 2004

Online music community sees over 30,000 songs licensed under “some rights reserved” copyright in just one month.

San Francisco, CA and New York, NY, USA - Soundclick (http://www.soundclick.com), one of the Internet’s largest music community sites, now offers Creative Commons licenses as an option for all songs uploaded to its website. Soundclick, which sees about 70,000 song uploads per month, soft-launched the Creative Commons license option one month ago. In that time, bands and artists on Soundclick have licensed over 30,000 songs, demonstrating a huge demand from musicians to declare “some rights reserved.”

A list of licensed tracks can be found at http://www.soundclick.com/genres/cc_license.cfm.

The copyright licenses, provided free by the nonprofit Creative Commons, permit fans not only to download music files, but also to copy and share them. In return, musicians who license their songs require attribution (credit as author) and can specify several conditions, including whether to allow remixes, mash-ups, or commercial uses.

The licenses allow artists to harness the power of the Net for maximum promotion while retaining certain rights to their work — while signaling clearly to fans what they can and can’t do.

“Soundclick’s move to offer Creative Commons Licenses is a huge step for the world of independent music,” said Neeru Paharia, Assistant Director of Creative Commons. “The rapid uptake of the licenses proves that there is a huge demand from artists to clarify how they want their work shared or re-used on the Net. Soundclick has made an enormous impact on the amount of music that’s available for people to share and re-use.”

“Opening the licensing process offers new dimensions for musicians,” said Turhan Canli, Chief Executive Officer of Soundclick. “The system developed by Creative Commons is easy to use and understand, even for people who have never considered licensing their music. Musicians on SoundClick are enthusiastic that they can share their songs this way. Being able to legally remix or re-use songs is an exciting and innovative option that clearly helps the whole music community. The fact that within one month more than 30,000 licenses were issued on SoundClick speaks volumes. It’s what musicians have been waiting for.”

Thanks to the rapid rate of adoption at Soundclick and other similar sites, Creative Commons has created the largest pool of openly-licensed music on the Internet. Most of the music can be legally traded on file-sharing networks, and much can be used as source material for remixes, mash-ups, or even synched to video, as long as the conditions of the license are followed. Given the recent proliferation of inexpensive media authoring applications, such as Apple’s GarageBand and Adobe’s Audition, much of this licensed music becomes valuable free source material from which to build new works.

About Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation founded in 2001, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works-whether owned or in the public domain-by empowering authors and audiences. It is sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation.

For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org.

About Soundclick

Launched in 1997, SoundClick Inc. is a privately funded company. Incorporated in 1999 in California, SoundClick has become one of the largest music communities on the Internet. More than 70,000 new songs and 7,000 new bands are added each month, making it the fastest growing music community. SoundClick features artist pages, unlimited song uploads, CD sales, message boards, charts, and several premium services. All standard services for artists and listeners are free-of-charge.

More information can be found at http://www.soundclick.com.

Contact

Neeru Paharia
Assistant Director, Creative Commons
neeru@creativecommons.org
+1.415.946.3068

Turhan Canli
CEO, SoundClick Inc
Press@soundclick.com

Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit/