Creative Commons » Jonathan Coulton

CC on the Free Music Archive

Cameron Parkins — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:32:29 +0000

It has been just over four months since the Free Music Archive launched as a destination for high-quality, freely licensed music. Since that time, the site has developed an avid community and grown to include a number of fantastic curators all while expanding upon the site’s initial catalog to host over 11,000 tracks. All told, the FMA has, in a very short time frame, become an indispensable destination for music lovers looking for freely-licensed music to download, share, and reuse.

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.

JoCo Looks Back on LegalTorrents

Fred Benenson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:26:08 +0000

We’ve posted all of the data that was offered on Jonathan Coulton’s “JoCo Looks Back” USB jump drive promotion on LegalTorrents. The zip file contains the entire “JoCo Looks Back” album (also available on CD for $15 from CDBaby.com) plus all of the separated source audio files from each track, all licensed under our Attribution-NonCommerical license.

Download the 730mb torrent and start your remixes today!

The Growing Hybrid Business of Music Sharing

Fred Benenson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:25:14 +0000

One of the things we’ve become very interested in finding more examples of are creators who are using our licenses in combination with traditional business models. For example, many musicians (including our recent Commoner Letter author Jonathan Coulton) sell copies of their CC-licensed music. This may seem cognitively dissonant but in practice it makes perfect sense, as a CC-licensed piece of music simply announces what you can do once you get your hands on it, and it certainly doesn’t restrict the original creator from selling it to you.

Some of the most robust instances of this behavior are musicians who have released CC-licensed material on iTunes, Amazon, and Magnatune. Ambient Electronic artist Kirsty Hawkshaw has done this with her album The Ice Castle, which has a presence in all three stores, but also indicates that is under CC’s Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. In the cases of iTunes and Amazon, the stores themselves are not using the CC license, but are selling the work via the rights they have under their direct agreement with the copyright holders – Hawkshaw and her label, Magnatune. For more about how CC licenses can work in tandem with other agreements, visit our page that describes CC+.

We’d love to hear and see more examples of this kind of hybrid business thinking utilizing our licenses. Do you know of any others? If so, just drop a comment on this post, or contact us any other way. Thanks!

Campaign Exclusive: Custom USB Drives & Unreleased Jonathan Coulton Album

Fred Benenson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:05:11 +0000

The ever innovative Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Jonathan Coulton has teamed up with Creative Commons to release his greatest hits compilation “JoCo Looks Back” on a 1gb custom Creative Commons jump drive to help support our 2008 campaign. If that weren’t enough, JoCo and CC have also included all of the unmixed audio tracks for every song on the drive. That’s over 700mb of JoCo thing-a-week goodness. Since all of JoCo’s music is released under our Attribution-NonCommercial license, this is an incredible opportunity for the public to remix and reuse his fantastic music. Song files are in 320kbps MP3 and unmixed audio tracks are in 256 VBR MP3.

We’ll be offering the drives exclusively at our $50 dollar donation level (and above) until December 31st. Also included are a CreativeCommons.net account, an OpenID identity, and a 2008 campaign sticker.

Jonathan also wrote a wonderful commoner letter speaking on how he, as a musician, uses Creative Commons to support himself and his career. Read it here.

These are the tracks featured on the compilation:

Code Monkey
Ikea
I Feel Fantastic
Mandelbrot Set
Tom Cruise Crazy
Shop Vac
Chiron Beta Prime
I’m Your Moon
My Monkey
Skullcrusher Mountain
I Crush Everything
When You Go
A Talk With George
You Ruined Everything
Creepy Doll
Mr. Fancy Pants
Baby Got Back
First of May
Re Your Brains (spelled “Re: Your Brains” on album cover)
The Future Soon