By contrast, on ccMixter, we’ve turned to a ‘call for remixes’ model where we get the artist to put the stems for an entire album into the Commons and keep it there. Therefore the concept of a ‘deadline’ seems mute. The best part is that the rights to the remixes are retained by the artist. This has proven to be much more amenable to the community and it has responded with 1,000s of remixes to calls by DJ Vadim, Bucky Jonson, Trifonic,Calendar Girl, Brad Sucks and Shannon Hurley.

Shannon exemplifies the new hybrid sharing+business model because when we she was ready to put together an album of remixes she licensed, for a fee, the remixes from the producers for the album “Second Light: The Ready to Wake Up Remixes” (AMIE Street, CD Baby and iTunes).

She will be performing the remixes with Ben Eisen on bass, Sam Cunningham on drums, and “my apple notebook” in Los Angeles on December 10th. This gig will be quite the party as ccMixter producer DJ Doughy will be flying from Kansas City, Mo. and I’ll be making a special trip to LA for this event as well. (There is a $12 charge at the door.)

Shannon Hurley Remix Album Release Party
Wed. Dec. 10th
8pm sharp, all ages
Genghis Cohen (map)
740 N. Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
$12 admission

Our latest call has special significance because we’ve been trying to get indie star State Shirt for a while and he’s come through in a big way. Not only did he put his entire “This is Old” album, stems, a cappellas and all, into the Commons but his plan is to use the remixes themselves as source material for a new album of original music. State is a master songwriter who writes and performs in an “energetic and ridiculously catchy” way according to DoKashiteru who should know: his DnB smasher remix was an Editor Pick minutes after upload.

The State Shirt call is: “Remix Me So I Can Remix You”

He says: “Creative Commons is the perfect antidote for a collapsing landscape still clinging to traditional copyright. I hope more artists discover that freedom, flexibility, collaboration and community are now an option. I also hope that my fellow ccMixters would want to get involved with me, in both the creation and re-creation of music.”

Can you give our reader’s a bit of background on you and your music? How long have you been creating music? What are your influences?

I started taking classical guitar lessons when I was 10 years old. I hated practicing and was never very good and quit because it was boring. Then when I was 14 or so I got into MOD/S3M trackers (Scream Tracker and then later Impulse Tracker) and was really into industrial/electronic music. I got an electric guitar a few years later and started trying to fit it all together as digital recording matured.

My influences were mostly classic rock as a kid. Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, etc, the stuff my dad listened to. As a teenager I was into more aggressive stuff: Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, etc. Besides being a lot harder, it had a real DIY ethic to it. There usually wasn’t much of a “band”, just one or two guys working on recordings. That was a huge inspiration because it seemed normal to me to think of doing everything myself. After that I mellowed out and de-gothed a bit but I secretly wish I could take myself seriously enough to rock like Ministry.

You release your music under a CC BY-SA license. Why did you choose to go that route? What has your experience been like? What would you say to an artist who is considering using CC licenses on their project?

Well, I resisted officially CC licensing my stuff for a long time, I thought it was unnecessary and a bunch of legal stuff I didn’t think anyone wanted to care about. But now I think the CC license is simply a shortcut to telling people “hey, go ahead”. While I had clearly said on my website “do whatever you like”, people would constantly ask me for permission anyway, which was strange to me.

I think CC licenses, the entire open attitude is absolutely essential for artists that don’t have huge promotion budgets. Without the money to force advertising and radio play down people’s throats, you have to rely on the good will of your fans spreading your music for you. And if you handcuff them by making it illegal, I think you’re doing yourself a real disservice.

You are one of the most remixed artists at ccMixter. Why do you think that is? What is your reaction to that title?

I’m not sure why it is, but I’m super happy about it. I think I got in early and have been very lucky that people have wanted to mess with my songs, whatever their reasons are. I have some small theory that the simplicity of my songs maybe makes them easier for people to work with, to imagine what can be done with them, but I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t compared my music with the other stuff that’s available on ccMixter. So I’m gonna go with luck.

Outside of musical remixes, have there been any other interesting cases of reuse that you can speak of?

My music’s wound up in lots of videos, school projects, VH1, recently a condom ad, before that it was in the stock MP3 player in a French car. Just lots of weird, awesome stuff I never could have planned or had the foresight to make happen. And I think it’s excellent, I just love to see the songs out there doing their own thing, having lives of their own. It feels like having kids: “Oh, so that’s what you’ve been up to! You crazy song, you!”

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know? What do you have in store for the future?

I may do a bit of touring in the new year, I’m trying to decide if I can do it without going into huge debt.. If you want to see me in your area, sign up on http://www.bradsucks.net/live/ and put yourself on the map. That’s what I’ll be using to determine where I go.

In the meantime I’m trying to recharge a bit creatively. Experimenting with sounds, working on some stories, a few web projects, tinkering with songs I’ve got banked up. Staying on track to finish the album took a level of discipline I’m not used to so it’ll be nice to play around a bit again and see what shakes out.

A lot’s changed since I started putting music on the Internet way back in 2001. Artist-endorsed free downloads were shocking. Flexible pricing was still an untested novelty. It was rare to find source files from artists and sharing music wasn’t encouraged by new artists.

Recently I was asked if I’d do anything different this time around [...] and I honestly couldn’t imagine why I’d do things different. The only reason I, a dude who made an album by himself in a country basement, has had any sort of success is because people took it upon themselves to share my music with their friends. They remixed it, they used it in their videos, they played it on their podcasts, they included it in software and games and it took on a life of its own.

To coincide with the album release, ccMixter got Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan, authors of the “Indie Band Survival Guide” to conduct an interview with Brad Sucks. Brad is one of the most sampled artists over at ccMixter and the interview sheds much more light on his music in particular and opinions on the music industry as a whole.