Diesel–U-Music is back! The 2006 edition of the popular international music contest is open to unsigned artists playing rock, urban/hip-hop, and electronic music. This year’s competition is sponsored by Diesel, Sony, and Billboard, and is presented in conjunction with Creative Commons. Here’s the coolest part: All of the songs entered into the contest will be…

John Buckman from Magnatune drew our attention to recent press coverage about the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s decision to eschew traditional music distribution methods and release their performance of Handel’s 1736 opera “Atalanta” exclusively through Magnatune. Apparently, the Orchestra’s decision was prompted by disappointing CD sales. Now the music can be enjoyed either by streaming at…

The April issue of Catalonian music magazine Enderrock includes lengthy article about Creative Commons and comes with a free CD entitled Música Lliure, which features 19 amazing CC-licensed songs from acts like Cheb Balowski, Dijous Paella, and Orxata Sound System. There’s also a bonus track, Gilberto Gil’s “Oslodum,” which also appeared on the Wired CD.…

San Francisco, USA & Brussels, Belgium – April 17, 2006 Creative Commons and Crammed Discs are pleased to announce the Crammed Discs Remix Contest taking place now at ccMixter. Crammed Discs artists Cibelle, DJ Dolores, and Apollo Nove — three of Brazil’s most creative musical innovators — are offering the audio source files from three…

Wednesday night’s CC Salon San Francisco concerned the future of music. James Polanco spoke about Fake Science’s CC licensed podcasts and emphasized that Fake Science is not a record label, but a digital distributor with a far lower cost structure — and lower costs for both artists and patrons. Fake Science has a great slogan:…

Audio fingerprinting (and more) company MusicIP has added the ability to attach a Creative Commons license to audio tracks registered via their ListenerLink service (press release; PDF). Community music metadatabase MusicBrainz is working with MusicIP’s fingerprinting technology and has also added the ability to track CC licenses, see details on the MusicBrainz blog. This will…

SectionZ is an electronic music community that is home to more than 650 Creative Commons-licensed tracks. There are lots of truly excellent CC sounds on the site — some of my favorites are Vaetxh‘s spacy drum ‘n’ bass anthem “The Moon Is to the Stars as a Dust Mote Is to Mars” and Smiff’s driving…

Following on from the recent decision in a Dutch Court, Creative Commons licenses have also been implicated in a decision in Spain. The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music. Unfortunately,…

Spanish bar owner does not have to pay license fees to Spain’s primary collecting society for CC-licensed music Barcelona, Spain & San Francisco, USA — March 23, 2006 Last month, the Lower Court number six of Badajoz, a city in Extremadura, Spain, ruled that a bar owner did not have to pay license fees to…

All have been mentioned here before, but never all in one place. I’m talking about CC music podcasts, now cataloged on our wiki. Listen, you’re in for a treat. I guarantee it, having listened to and enjoyed nearly every espisode of all of the listed shows. By the way, the original CC music podcast is…