It is always gratifying to see CC supporters (superheroes even!) quickly respond — see stories on Boing Boing, Slashdot, and Techdirt.

CBC Radio’s program director responded with a comment on several of those stories, excerpted here:

The issue with our use of Creative Commons music is that a lot of our content is readily available on a multitude of platforms, some of which are deemed to be “commercial” in nature (e.g. streaming with pre-roll ads, or pay for download on iTunes) and currently the vast majority of the music available under a Creative Commons license prohibits commercial use.

In order to ensure that we continue to be in line with current Canadian copyright laws, and given the lack of a wide range of music that has a Creative Commons license allowing for commercial use, we made a decision to use music from our production library in our podcasts as this music has the proper usage rights attached.

Everyone can rest easy– there are no “groups” setting out to stop the use of Creative Commons music at the CBC, and we will continue to use Creative Commons licensed music, pictures etc. across a number of our non-commercial platforms.

It is good to know that the CBC will continue to use CC-licensed works in some cases, and their explanation of why not in others. And it is true that only a minority of CC-licensed music is released under a license that permits commercial use — for example, about 26% of the nearly 40,000 CC-licensed albums on Jamendo.

However, as Michael Geist, Cory Doctorow, and many others have subsequently pointed out, CC-licensed music that does permit commercial use ought be allowed. Geist:

A better approach – one that respects the choices of both artist and producer – would be to require that programs only use music with the appropriate rights, which could include some CC licenced music.

Bigger picture: finding, sharing, and supporting music under CC licenses permitting commercial use

Hopefully the CBC will listen to the feedback of Geist, Doctorow (both Canadians, as it happens), and others. However, the incident is a good reminder of the opportunity for music under CC licenses permitting commercial use, sites and curators that facilitate finding and sharing such music — including letting people know about the many that do exist.

(Note that many musicians have chosen to release music with CC licenses containing the NonCommercial term with good reason; this post is meant to point out the opportunity for others, not a critique of those who have chosen to limit commercial use.)

Jamendo may host the largest current collection of CC-licensed music permitting commercial use. See (and contribute to) our wiki article with tips on finding commercially usable CC-licensed music for much more at sites ranging SoundCloud to Wikimedia Commons to Libre.fm.

If you’re an artist with experience sharing music, including for commercial purposes permitted under an appropriate CC license, or the developer of a site or other service for discovering, distributing, supporting such music, or otherwise add to this ecosystem, please let us know — and thank you!

First comes news today that The Everybody, a new project from Joey Santiago and David Lovering (guitarist and drummer of the Pixies, respectively), have released their latest album Avatar with a CC-licensed twist. Available in both MP3 and lossless formats, a deluxe version of the album can be purchased ($40) that includes CC BY BY-SA licensed stems for each track. Beyond the legal freedoms this choice allows, The Everybody are asking for submissions of re-worked tacks to include in a forthcoming release which will be submitted the band through CC-friendly music community Soundcloud:

Once David and Joey have had a chance to check out all of the tracks they’re going to choose the best of the best of these new creations and turn them into an album called The Everybody Else and release it as a limited-edition gatefold vinyl alongside the originals in Spring 2010.

Phlow Magazine is currently running a month-long feature called The Best Creative Commons Music Moments in 2009. Every day until Christmas, a new post goes live from one of “the worlds most active Creative Commons music freaks,” featuring their favorite songs, netlabels, and albums from the open music universe. The series gives a great overview of how diverse and expansive CC-licensed music has become, unearthing a bevy of musical gems in the process.

finished monome kit, jonbro | CC BY

The Monome Community Remix Project is a collaborative project in which contributors create samples, upload them to a community pool, and make remixes from the community collection. In keeping with its namesake, all remixes must utilize the monome, an open-source hardware controller, as a compositional tool. The first round of the project is now complete, with a CC BY-NC-SA licensed compilation of the final remixes available for download and stream at the MCRP website. The second iteration is currently underway, although the initial deadline for contributions has passed. Thankfully, a third round is planned for January.

IH&RA members comprise around 300,000 hotels and 8 million restaurants, making this an incredible case study for how CC-licensed content can be monetized on a large scale. Artists that distribute their music through Jamendo PRO will receive half of the revenue generated from the licensing – these are the same artists who use Jamendo, the open music sharing site, to distribute CC-licensed recordings for free to the public under CC-licenses of their choosing.

The FMA has always offered and promoted CC licenses as a means to share the majority of music uploaded to the site. Today we are ecstatic to announce that CC has joined the FMA’s curatorial ranks! We’re celebrating with 50 great tracks that will be both familiar to the CC community while hopefully offering some new names as well. The launch is split into two mixes – our FMA Inaugural Mix and The WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.

We’ll be doing regular updates to our collection over the coming months and our next featured mix will highlight some of the great community-driven artists and collaborations found at sites like ccMixter, Jamendo, Beatpick, Sutros, and more. We are on continuous lookout for great CC-licensed music to add to our page and would love to hear your suggestions on tracks and artists in the comments.

20,000 albums? We can hardly believe it!

Well, it seems like just a few months ago we were celebrating 10,000 albums published on jamendo and this weekend we passed the 20,000 album mark!

Actually, it was 11 months ago to be precise. Look at it this way and you’ll understand why we’re the first to be impressed with the figures: it will have taken jamendo 3 years to gather 10,000 albums, and then just under one year later, that number has doubled!

It’s pretty safe to say we’re going strong. And even safer to say it’s all thanks to you: artists, members and everyone contributing to spread the word of free music!

You can see those 20,000 albums broken down by license at jamendo.com/creativecommons.

Speaking of “we can hardly believe it” and collections of CC licensed media, I recently noticed a post on this blog from 2005:

We’re also happy to see growth at Flickr has gone way beyond our expectations to nearly 1.5 million photos licensed for reuse.

Two months ago Flickr reached 100 million CC licensed photos.

Congratulations to Jamendo and may today’s surprise only hint at an astounding future.

Jamendo pro offers event organizers an alternative to collective rights societies (ASCAP, MCPS, SOCAN…), which allows you to save the fees they apply, while enjoying a quality music catalog available by online streaming.

Jamendo will also provide you with a certificate guaranteeing you do not have to pay any copyright fees. Check out the the respective pages for background music, public event music, music for audiovisual works, and music for websites and blogs.

From CC Luxembourg:

This is a good opportunity to celebrate that the world of CC music is amazing for its depth and growth, not only for singular successes. One of many indicators is that Jamendo is on the cusp of reaching 15,000 openly licensed albums. They’ve put out a call for best of 2008 lists. It turns out fans have been building such lists all year, which is great, as discovery is the challenge.

My discovered on Jamendo in 2008 list follows. Except for the last track, you probably won’t enjoy this much, but that’s not the point — there are lots of other people discovering CC licensed music (at Jamendo and elsewhere) — follow them and you could be too. Or, if you share my taste in noise music…

KORIZA (Komitet Operativnoy Razrabotki Industrialnyh Zennostey Avangarda) from Saint Petersburg, Russia. They've released one experimental mathcore single, New Orlean Sunset Club that is deeply satisfying but a little too mellow. They are supposedly working on "new material, that will be much more experimental, vanguard & violent." CAN'T WAIT.

Dr Pombo: Trastorno de la personalidad Rock electrónico psicodélico from Ermua, Spain. Recommed the track La mano de Dios.

Desarraigo of Ningúnlado (Nowhere), Mexico does very short, violent tracks with a drum machine, screaming, and GNU/Linux. On Polvo recommend Criadero De Polvo, which adds night sounds, a 46 second epic.

En Busca Del Pasto, an improvisational project from Madrid, Spain, has released 24 albums on Jamendo. Improvisación para dúo, Nº 4 («Pan y vino») is heavier on electronics and sampling than typical for EBDP. Parte segunda from that album is excellent.

Daniele Torelli of Reggio Emilia, Italy works with the electronic band Yue and put out We Don't Care (single), a snappy little song.

Merci-Merci does lo-fi slow dance punk from La Rochelle, France. Souvenirs d'un océan disparu's Océan Pacifique is a very pleasant listen.

Tom Fahy led a prolific group of musicians in St. John's, Canada. Fahy died June of this year, a huge loss for music. The group's output of 70 albums on Jamedo ranges stylistically from instrumental rock to jazz to classical, with many variations. Some recommendations include Endgame: A Tribute to Bobby Fischer, instrumental rock, hear Defence; Hotel, raga influenced jazz, Epilogue; Little Fatty: Studies in Atonality, classical, Little Fatty No. 1; and 1986, instrumental rock, Miss Rose Tells The Future. [Edited March 2013; see note below]

Telemetrics Callsign 65:41 Noise and samples from Whitehouse, Ohio, USA. 25 minutes of easy on the ears listening.

Jamison Young, a musician and activist from Australia but based in Prague, Czech Republic, had a surprise this year from Shifting Sands Of A Blue Car when its Memories Child was featured in the X-Files: I Want to Believe movie. Not my usual type of music, but it grows on you. No reason for it to not be in heavy rotation on a supermarket PA near you.

Individual tracks listed above are assembled at http://www.jamendo.com/en/playlist/97841. All are available under CC BY or CC BY-SA.

Update (March 28, 2013): Tom Fahy‘s music is no longer available on Jamendo, but it is now hosted on Internet Archive. We’ve updated the links to the Internet Archive listings.

What would happen if you combined digg‘s voting structure with Jamendo‘s CC business model and a healthy dose of free culture? You would end up with Nodes.fm.

Nodes.fm encourages musicians to upload their music so that it can be voted upon. Besides operating at no cost to musicians, and using our copyleft Attribution-ShareAlike license, Nodes.fm is free software as its codebase is released under the Free Software Foundation’s AGPL license.

At a moment where copyright laws are becoming always more restrictive, in particular in France with the HADOPI initiative, this event will give the opportunity to the Creative Commons community to reaffirm its commitment to openness, sharing and freedom.

A round-table will open the discussions with pioneers and old-time users of the CC licenses in France: music platforms Dogmazik and Jamendo, book publisher In Libro Veritas, the local government of Brest and public TV/radio Arte Radio.

The CC Salon Paris will feature a debate on “Creative Commons licenses today and after” followed drinks, music, project, and file sharing. More information is available on the CC France website. You can also register for the Salon on Facebook.