DMusic, the oldest independent digital online music community now supports Creative Commons in their upload process. More importantly though, DMusic is providing the first web-based application to embed Creative Commons license information into ID3 tags of MP3 files. Now, when you upload your MP3 file to DMusic and choose a Creative Commons license, DMusic will put the license into the MP3 file for you. When people download your file, or share it on a file-sharing network, there will always be a way to detect the Creative Commons license.

Our hope was that one day, file-sharing networks would start to display our license information to their users, so people could easily find legal music to download. Currently search engines like Alta Vista, and applications like iRATE Radio, are able to display this information.

If you want to see how this works, check out this search result from Alta Vista’s MP3 search engine. Some of the top search results have a field called “copyright,” that contain and display Creative Commons license information pulled right out of the MP3 file.

The more MP3 files out there with embedded licence information, the easier it will be to build new applications around the distribution of legal music.

DMusic’s free service gives its members 75 MB of space to host music. In addition, you can post pictures, events, mailing lists, and even send messages to other people on the network. Check it out, and thanks DMusic — this is a big step for us.