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.

Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band Goes CC!

Fred Benenson, October 14th, 2009

Photo via yopob.com, All Rights Reserved

Yoko Ono wants you to remix her track “The Sun Is Down!” whose stems are released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license. You can download the sample pack which includes the track’s vocal effects, loops of bass, drums, sound effects, and Tenorion files.

But Yoko’s also running a contest to find the 10 best remixes. Here are the details:

Create your own remix of “The Sun Is Down!” by Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, using as many or few of the samples from the pack and any original audio you wish to add.

When you have finished your mix, make an MP3 copy that’s as high quality as possible, but still under 10MB in size.

Email the MP3 of your mix, along with its name and your name, address, email and phone number to remix@YOPOB.com before 12 December 2009.

The Top Ten mixes will be decided by Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band.

The winners will receive special signed Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band prizes and will be featured on this site over the Xmas and New Year period.

Head over to Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band for the full contest details and to download the sample pack.

DJ Vadim Remixes U in Secret ccMixter Event

Victor Stone, October 7th, 2009

DJ Vadim and Creative Commons are celebrating ccMixter’s fifth anniversary with Secret Mixter October ‘09. In this event, the 6th of its kind on ccMixter, starting today, musicians and singers sign up to have their name put into a virtual hat. After the two week sign-up period, everyone is notified, in secret, with a remix assignment. They then have two weeks to do a remix of their
assignment. On November 4th, everybody will upload their remix – including Vadim!

DJ Vadim has long been a strong proponent of including his fans in the musical experience. He has been sharing the full studio stems and a cappellas to his albums on ccMixter.org for several years. In early 2009, in advance of his album “U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun,” he gave a featured commoner interview where he said

“…releasing music is communication. Nowadays, that means participation and that is what ccMixter offers. It is a combination of the two, letting fans and music people participate and communicate together, with you, with me and create new music and ideas.”

With his participation in the Secret Mixter, Vadim is making the ultimate statement about what it means to communicate with his fans.

Come and join the ongoing musical conversation of the Commons at the Secret Mixter October ‘09 – you never know who’s going to remix you.

Aviary Release Myna Audio Editor

Cameron Parkins, September 16th, 2009

Today Aviary released Myna, a powerful online audio editor complete with a professional sample/loop library, numerous effects, automatons, advanced clip editing (time-stretching, reverse, etc.) and import/export capabilities. Check out the full list of features at the Myna landing page.

In releasing Myna, Aviary have added another great tool to their suite of creative applications, furthering their mission to “make the world’s creation accessible.” All of Aviary’s tools allow users the ability to share sets with the community under both our Attribution and Attribution-NonCommercial licenses, making their platform not only technically robust but legally sound as well.

Indaba Music Continues To Grow

Cameron Parkins, September 14th, 2009

Indaba Music has had a busy summer.

July saw the launch of Session Console 2.0, an upgrade of Indaba’s digital music workstation that allows musicians to collaboratively record, edit, and mix tracks online. An improved engine built on Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX platform makes the tool more robust and streamlined. The relaunch was paired with a new library of CC-licensed audio loops and sounds that Indaba solicited from its community.

Not only has Indaba worked to improve the ease and power of its tools, but the company has also been hard at work producing compelling programs for its community to engage in. The previously mentioned remix contest with twin sister pop-rock act Carmen and Camille saw audio stems from the duo’s song “Shine 4U” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Similar remix contests from Rivers Cuomo of Weezer and The Crystal Method gave community members the ability to win some amazing musical gear, while a collaboration with Intrahealth OPEN found artists submitting music in an effort to help fund health care services for the developing world.

This is all while maintaining and supporting an active community of artists that are creating and collaborating on new music everyday. Check out our March 2008 interview conducted with Indaba co-founders Matthew Siegel and Daniel Zaccagnino for more information.

CC as a hybrid organization and a tool for hybrids

Mike Linksvayer, June 8th, 2009

Used in connection with Creative Commons the word “hybrid” has typically denoted an “economy” or “models” involving both sharing and commerce. Over half of CC founder Lawrence Lessig’s most recent book is devoted to exploring this sort of hybrid — see Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. CC licenses are a vital tool for enabling such hybrids in an environment where the default is hostile to the “sharing” side of the equation.

In a series of thought provoking blog posts Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, has introduced a different but entirely complementary “hybrid” — hybrid organizations. What is a hybrid organization? Mark asks and tentatively answers that question in the first post of the series:

So, what is a hybrid org? In the case of Mozilla — and an increasing number of other orgs — it’s a mix of social mission, disruptive market strategies and web-like scale and collaboration. Or, at least, that’s the definition I see emerging.

Another intriguing description, from the same post:

All of these organizations are trying to ‘move the market’ on the web in a way that both engages and benefits a broad public. As they do so, they are charting new territory.

Many of the comments and blogged replies are well worth reading, offering refinements and alternative descriptions. Frank Hecker, also of the Mozilla Foundation, provides some critical grounding in the theory of disruptive innovation. Commenter Stephan provides an alternative and also compelling description:

I find it easier to think about these organizations as a hybrid between a classical (hierarchical) organization and a social movement (or network).

It is the mix of the two that requires both a market perspective (the classic organization needs to make money to function) and a social mission (need that to create passion for the product or service among your the movement or network).

Much has been said about the interaction of movements and organizations — see Epistemic Communities and Social Movements : Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons for a paper looking at the CC case — and how digital networks are changing the boundaries and interactions of movements and organizations. Nearly all of the organizations Mark mentions in his series have a strong “movement” aspect. One open question I have about hybrid organizations is their relationship to movements, or more broadly, non-organizational actors. Are hybrid organizations better able to leverage (and be leveraged by) the non-organizational sector, itself abetted by digital networks? Or even have hybrid organizations arisen in order for non-organizational actors and movements to achieve things in the world that require just-enough-organization and market savvy?

Stephen DeBerry provides an astutely skeptical comment on hybrid organizations:

One can approach this hybrid space with varying intent. In your/my case public benefit is central and necessary. In other cases the claim of public benefit is great marketing, but the actual public benefit is secondary or worse.

If that’s the case then there’s an interesting question for those seeking to drive public benefit: how do you ensure the public benefit remains core to the hybrid model?

This is a place where CC plays a vital role as a tool for hybrids. Just as CC licenses enable healthy hybrid economies and models, use of CC licenses by a hybrid organization help signal that such an organization takes its public benefit side seriously, and help ensure that it continues to do so. With so much of hybrid organizations’ output being digital media, offering that media under CC licenses, in particular free as in freedom ones, serve as a continual check-up on the organization’s public benefit intent, and an assurance against lock-in if that intent wavers. There may be useful parallels to be drawn between unhealthy “sharecropping” hybrid models (typically where a web company retains all of the rights to media created by users, making users unfree to use their own creations) and the hybrid organization as “great marketing” or worse described by Stephen. It should also be noted that free and open source software licenses provide a similar and complementary check on hybrid organizations that produce software — and nearly all do, at least in the form of customization of web site software.

What about CC as a hybrid organization? We’re very carefully exploring the most obvious incarnation of hybrid in the form of the CC Network. However, the addition of a non-donation revenue stream to a nonprofit isn’t necessary or sufficient to qualify it as a hybrid organization (see Frank Hecker’s post). Mark Surman’s initial descriptions of hybrid organizations (see above) don’t even mention business or revenue. These are worth quoting again, as the top of this post is far away:

[A] mix of social mission, disruptive market strategies and web-like scale and collaboration … trying to ‘move the market’ on the web in a way that both engages and benefits a broad public.

This of course describes just what Creative Commons does. Through free (as in freedom as well as gratis — and yes zero price is a market strategy as is freedom) and carefully branded legal and technical tools deployed on a web scale in collaboration with businesses, affiliates, supportive movements, and individuals, Creative Commons is “moving the market” consensus and practice away from default lockdown and toward more hack-remix-opportunity-generative-ness (to quote another and not explicitly related Mark Surman post) or more conventionally, more sharing, freedom, openness, autonomy and lower transaction costs and barriers to collaboration and innovation.

Be sure to read the rest (so far) of Mark’s hybrid organizations series — Hybrid orgs. What’s old? What’s new?, Why do hybrid orgs matter?, and What challenges do hybrid orgs face?

Creative Commons will be watching this discussion closely, and participating. Do you find the “hybrid organization” construct useful? What insights can be gained from the construct and experiences of other hybrids to make CC a more effective organization (hybrid or not) and enabler of healthy hybrids — organizations, models, and economies?

CC Talks With: DJ Vadim

Cameron Parkins, May 20th, 2009

Having played over 1600 gigs in over 60 countries, DJ Vadim is no stranger to the concept of ‘fan interaction’. Beyond his live shows, Vadim pushes experiments with interaction further, having held a remix contest at ccMixter a little under two years ago to promote his album The Sound Catcher. The contest was a great success, and as a result Vadim, active as both a DJ and producer, is back at ccMixter doing the same thing with his latest album U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun.

The contest is in full swing, with winners receiving inclusion in Imaginashun – Power to the people, an album filled “with remixes from pro’s and bedroom producers from around the world” slated for release this autumn. We caught up with DJ Vadim to learn a bit more about his creative process and how he views the changing nature of interaction and communication in music. Read on to see what he had to say.

DJ Vadim supporting Mos Def at The Islington Academy, James Bradley

Can you give our readers some background on yourself as an artist? You’ve worked with a wide variety of musicians, from The Pharcyde to Kraftwerk, and released countless albums, singles, and remixes. Your career is long in scope and prolific in production but perhaps you are able to distill it all into a manageable chunk.

I started my music journey in the late 80’s, first with DJing, and in 1992 I started getting involved with production. It was very simple back then, just an Atari and a sampler. There weren’t the possibilities people have now. In ‘94 , I set up my own label and the rest is history.

In that journey i met and have worked and performed with lots of people, although rocking Glastonbury in 1999 and performing at Sonar in 2006 with DJ Krush and DJ Shadow stand out as highlights.

Have technological shifts changed how you approach music production? What kind of production tools do you do use?

Yes. I have so many more possibilities now that didn’t exist 15 years ago. I have so much more equipment, software, and toys for creating music now that didn’t exist or was not affordable. It is a bit like riding a push bike and going on a top of the range Yamaha super bike – they both get you to where your going but you have so much more options with the super bike, right?

I use Cubase, an MPC, my Apple computer and Ableton Live.

The environment leading up to your new album U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun was one of personal turmoil and growth. What was the process you went through on the way to releasing this album? How did the aesthetic of the album come into fruition as a result?

Well, when you go through turmoil and tragedy you can come out of it either being overwhelmed, pensive, and quite depressed or come out fighting and positive. I did the later. I felt that if cancer couldn’t hold me back, nothing would. It was hard – personal turmoil with my family, personal relationships and my own health. It was like being stripped back to nothing. But now I feel good about life and that is the most important.

What is your motivation behind the U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun remix contest? You’ve already done one successful contest on ccMixter – what was your experience like previously?

Well I think one of the most important things with releasing music is communication. Nowadays, that means participation and that is what ccMixter offers. It is a combination of the two, letting fans and music people participate and communicate together, with you, with me and create new music and ideas. This sort of interaction wasn’t possible 10 years ago.

Music is about communication. Without it you either have a huge MTV campaign or you get lucky – the music that people like is one that communicates with them, music that they (the fans) feel part of.

Both remix contests are using CC-licenses as their mechanism to enable this kind of reuse. As an artist who uses sampling as one of their core techniques, how do you view this sort of licensing? What are the major differences to you between working with live musicians and sampling material?

I think its a great marketing and promotional tool plus it is fun for the fans and producers. In regards to sampling and live musicians, you have more opportunities with live musicians because you can break any piece of music down to its basic elements – bass keys, drums etc. and hence be able to manipulate and control what you do much more

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know? Any plans for the future?

Well touring, releasing more music and making new music. I am up to so much its hard to remember it all. Best thing is to keep up with it via my homepage and MySpace profile!

U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun Artwork, SMALL Studio

Bloomsbury Academic to Release “Science, Ethics and Innovation” Series for Free Under CC Licenses

Cameron Parkins, May 13th, 2009

Bloomsbury Academic, the recently-launched academic publishing imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, just announced their first series publication, Science, Ethics and Innovation. The series will be edited by Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston and professor John Harris.

The series will be released online as free, CC-licensed downloads with hard copies available for sale. More from The Guardian:

The series will be the first from Bloomsbury’s new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher’s post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies.

In related news, Bloomsbury Academic’s digital publication of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy has now been downloaded for free in over 105 countries, while hard copies have also been selling well.

Lessig’s REMIX Released Under CC License; Remix Contest Launched By Bloomsbury Academic

Cameron Parkins, May 1st, 2009

Lawrence Lessig’s latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is getting the CC treatment from Bloomsbury Academic (CC coverage here and here). Starting today, the entire book is available for free download under a CC BY-NC license from Bloomsbury Academic’s website.

We are incredibly excited that a text devoted to the art and value of remixing is being released under a license that allows free and open sharing and reuse – it turns out we aren’t the only ones. To celebrate the launch, Bloomsburry is holding a contest titled Remix the Remixer:

To celebrate the Creative Commons release of Lawrence Lessig’s latest book, Remix, Bloomsbury Academic are hosting a competition you have the chance to win an original remixed item created by Cory Doctorow on the 1st of May (with a video of the event), £200 (about 300 USD) worth of Bloomsbury books and a copy of Remix signed by Lessig himself.

The competition is called Remix the Remixer. Just remix any of Lawrence Lessig’s existing work and create something that is new, unique and creative.

Here’s how it works: Find any video, interview, or written work of Lessig’s, mash it up with another piece of Lessig’s work and create something new. It can be a video (3 min max), photo (nothing offensive, please) or text.

Be sure to upload your remixes between now (May 1) and May 31 to be considered for the prize drawings.

Call for Remixes: Snowflake’s Earth Day Challenge

Victor Stone, April 13th, 2009

Creative Commons and Snowflake are proud to announce a call for remixes in honor of Earth Day 2009. Singer, musician and poet Snowflake has put all the stems, including the a cappella for her song Apologize into the Commons under an Attribution NonCommercial license, hosted on ccMixter, and is looking for remixes to be featured on her site on April 20th.

After all the remixes are posted, Snowflake will pick her favorite remix and include it as a surprise 11th track on her FanClub release “One or Ten” on April 20th. She tells us the remixer will be awarded producer royalties for the track as well.

In addition, Snowflake has generously offered to donate $200 to a green non-profit, to be chosen by the producer of her favorite remix of Apologize.

Snowflake is a long time and popular contributor to ccMixter and thinks “ccMixter embodies a significant evolution in synergistic sound. With creativity expanding from its source, our musical compositions gain color, speed and strength as we share, mix, and mash.”

Make sure to check out Snowflake at her new website that features both her ccMixter source tracks and five favorite remixes.

There’s not a lot time left to crank out the tunes so read more and download the sources at Snowflake’s Earth Day Call for Remixes.