Brooklyn Museum & Blondie’s Chris Stein launch CC-licensed remix project

Cameron Parkins, October 22nd, 2009

On October 30th, Brooklyn Museum will open Who Shot Rock & Roll, an exhibition commemorating photographers and their creative role in rock & roll history. To celebrate, the museum has teamed up with Chris Stein – co-founder of the legendary new wave band Blondie (and one of the photographers featured in the exhibit) – for a companion musical project called Who Shot Drums and Bass.

Drums and Bass is made up of eight original songs composed by Stein in DrumCore and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Brooklyn Museum is asking remixers to download the tracks from its Soundcloud page and remix them for the Who Shot Rock & Roll: Remix! contest. Remixes are due December 1st, and will be judged by Stein and Matthew Yokobosky – Brooklyn Museum’s Chief Designer. The creator of the winning remix will receive a copy of the Who Shot Rock & Roll companion book signed by author Gail Buckland and have their remix featured during the Target First Saturday party in January.

More info, including contest rules and registration, is available Brooklyn Museum’s website.

CC Hold Music? Yes, Really.

Fred Benenson, August 20th, 2009

Digium, the parent company that hosts and maintains the open source telephony & PBX project called Asterisk, recently replaced the on-hold music featured in their distributions to CC BY-SA licensed works from OpSound. Using freely licensed CC music in open source projects has always made sense to us, but Digium’s John Todd discusses why they finally made the switch on the company’s blog:

In some nations (Australia and France, to pick two that have been brought to our attention) there are some who are claiming that we do not have the rights outlined above, and that our users therefore are in a similar situation where they may be in violation of license terms.

John goes on to explain that since CC licenses are easy to use, well defined, and accepted internationally, the choice was clear to them:

This is very far outside of Digium’s ability or interest to manage, nor do we wish to become involved in the protracted series of legal proceedings required to sort out this licensing issue. So we have chosen another path that is more clear to us: we will eliminate the files of questionable license from Asterisk, and replace them with music that has clearly defined and more acceptable licensing terms which are compatible with both the Asterisk license, and with any reasonable redistribution methods that might be used by others who re-package Asterisk.

(emphasis added)

Just think, the next time you get placed on hold, there’s a good chance you’ll be listening to some copyleft music!

NIN’s CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 Album

Fred Benenson, January 5th, 2009

NIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.