WIRED magazine today announced that rock band Spoon will headline a concert to benefit Creative Commons on September 10, 2007 at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. The concert is a kick-off event for WIRED NextFest, a unique world’s-fair-style event showcasing future technologies in design, entertainment, communication, healthcare, transportation, sustainable living, and more, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, September 13–16, 2007.
Spoon is an Austin, TX-based quartet with five full-length albums to its credit, and its heavily anticipated sixth album, entitled “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” is slated for release on July 10. Spoon’s previous album, “Gimme Fiction,” received widespread acclaim and appeared on “Best of 2005” lists in Blender and Spin. In 2004, Spoon joined artists such as the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, My Morning Jacket, a pre-Gnarls-Barkley Danger Mouse (featuring Cee-Lo), and the Rapture in donating tracks to the Creative Commons-licensed WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.
Proceeds from the concert will benefit Creative Commons, the non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share legally. This is the third benefit concert WIRED has produced to benefit Creative Commons. Previous concerts featured David Byrne and Gilberto Gil; and Girl Talk, Diplo and Peeping Tom.
The concert will serve as a live reunion for Spoon and Keepon the robot, which achieved online celebrity status in April after the little robot became a YouTube sensation dancing to Spoon’s song, “I Turn My Camera On.” The video “Keepon Dancing to Spoon” is available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g-yrjh58ms and boasts over 1.2 million views and scores of online imitators. Following the concert, Keepon will be holding court at WIRED NextFest September 13-16.
Tickets go on sale Saturday, June 23, for the all-ages general admission show priced at $20. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster.com.
In addition to enjoying Spoon’s critically acclaimed music and supporting an important cause in Creative Commons, concertgoers will get a sneak peek at some of the futuristic exhibits to be showcased at WIRED NextFest. Attendees of the benefit concert will get a free ticket to WIRED NextFest for Friday, September 14.
To learn more and to purchase tickets for WIRED NextFest, please visit http://www.wirednextfest.com.
About WIRED
For nearly 15 years, WIRED has been the first word on how technology is changing the world around us. Each month, the magazine delivers a glimpse into the future of business, science, entertainment, education, culture, and politics. Under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson, WIRED has been nominated for an unprecedented six consecutive National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, winning the industry’s prestigious top prize in 2007 and 2005. WIRED magazine and Wired.com reach nearly 6 million readers per month.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works—whether owned or in the public domain. Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. It is sustained by the generous support of various organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as members of the public. For general information, visit https://creativecommons.org.
Contact
Alexandra Constantinople
WIRED Media
+1 415 276 5962
Alexandra_Constantinople@wired.com
Bill Danon
Bite Communications for WIRED Media
+1 310 295 2140
bill.danon@bitepr.com
Michael Gregoire, curator of the beautiful netBloc compilation series (previously mentioned here and here; #6 now available) has published an essay on some of the things needed to make open music a part of mainstream culture:
Once a listener realizes that net audio is as good or better than mainstream music, they’re in. They’re part of the movement. They begin to explore the net audio world. The more you explore and listen to net audio, the less you’re influenced by the mainstream music-industry. Wouldn’t it be great if it were easier for these new listeners to find GREAT new net audio? What can be done to make it easier to dig through the immense numbers of net audio releases?
Music to my ears. I’ve been harping on the criticality of discovery services and tastemakers (and praising ones that exist) for a few years. There’s now a lot more great CC licensed music available than when I started.
Speaking of tastemaking, check out the music of Lee Maddeford.
I first read of Lee Maddeford in a comment on Bob Ostertag’s website. Ostertag was announcing the release of every recording he held the rights to under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license.
Maddeford had similarly put his recordings online under the same license, but a year earlier.
There’s a huge variety of quality music (well over 10 hours of recordings) to enjoy, crossing several genres and many projects led by Maddeford under various names. Visit his listening lounges to browse roughly by genre (piano duo, songs in French, songs in English, lab, and others), the library for lyrics, lead sheets, scores, and information lounges describing each project.
I should especially point out some ironic pop songs that may have wide appeal (mp3s), including a goth spoof Scratch My Body, 80s ska sounding Optical Illusion , and an over the top Le Train.
There’s also plenty of avant leaning material that meets my approval, but I finally want to point out a few tracks that I cannot get out of my head. Actually five different recordings (mp3s) of the same simple composition, called [Le] Bouchon: Bouchon, Bouchon 1, Bouchon 2, Bouchon 3, Le Bouchon.
Go explore Lee Maddeford’s music yourself. Don’t worry if something gets stuck in your head–it won’t be wasted space, as you’ll be able to use it in your own creation down the line.
We are very pleased to announce that Spoon, the Austin, TX based rock-quartet, will headline a benefit concert for Creative Commons on September 10, 2007, at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles!
The concert will function not only as a fundraiser for CC, but also as a kick off for WIRED NextFest, “a unique world’s-fair-style event showcasing future technologies in design, entertainment, communication, healthcare, transportation, sustainable living and more”. NextFest will be taking place at the Los Angeles Convention Center between September 13 and 16 – you can read WIRED’s press release about the concert and NextFest here.
If that wasn’t enough, the concert will also serve as a reunion of sorts for Spoon and “Keepon the Robot”. If you have no clue who or what Keepon is, head over to YouTube and prepare to be mesmerized. Look at that thing move!
This is incredible news – we’ve got our calendars marked and are counting down the days. Tickets go on sale this Saturday (June 23rd) at 10AM and are only $20! Get yours here through Ticketmaster.
Creative Commons is developing LiveContent, a project to connect and expand Creative Commons and open source communities. The first output of LiveContent will be ccLiveCD for libraries, which will package free and open source software (FOSS) with CC-licensed content. ccLiveCD aims to demonstrate an example of an easy-to-use, viable alternative to proprietary software and further explore possibilities of the FOSS and Creative Commons movements within libraries.
ccLiveCD will come loaded with lots of great content, including a live-boot Linux OS, a combination of free and open source productivity and creativity applications (such as OpenOffice, Inkscape, Gimp and VLC), open document templates, and a variety of Creative Commons-licensed multimedia and educational content.
Worldlabel.com is providing the support for the development of this project and the distribution of the CD. Watch for ccLiveCD updates, and help further the LiveContent vision by contributing ideas, connections to other projects, and best-of-CC content on the wiki.
Last Friday (June 15th), Where are the Joneses?, a “daily fictional interactive comedy shot entirely for the web”, went live. The show is written collaboratively by the Where are the Joneses? community, released on to YouTube under a CC Attribution-Sharealike licence, and funded as a marketing experiment for Ford Motors (as a big purple van is featured in every episode).
Certainly a hybrid of ideologies, Where are the Joneses? is as funny as it is forward thinking. This model for media production is outlined superbly by Rob Myers on his blog where he discusses the show in relation to its use of participatory creation, CC licensing, and as a marketing tool. Truly a must read to understand the unique importance of such an experiment.
The Spanish short film, Lo que tú Quieras Oír–released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license–has achieved a huge amount of popularity on YouTube, totaling close to 10,000,000 views!
While the film itself is quite brilliant, the CC license enables its viewers to not only freely distribute the film, but also remix it as long as they give credit, do so with non-commercial intent, and share their new works under the same license. We can only hope that part of the short’s online success has been enhanced by this decision to utilize CC licensing.
Don’t forget to check out the film’s website (Spanish; English translation via Google) as well!
From the Science Commons blog …
“Today Nature Publishing Group launches Nature Precedings – a free document sharing service for the sciences. The service further enables scientists to share their preliminary findings and research in a free environment, while allowing authors to retain copyright in their work. All accepted contributions are released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, allowing for the material to be reused and redistributed as long as it is attributed to the author under terms specified.
This is the biological equivalent of the physics arXiv, but with a critical improvement. Placing pre-prints online solves the problem of an individual’s ability to access an article. But in the absence of an explicit copyright license, it’s unclear what that individual can actually do with the downloaded file. Nature’s choice to use CC-BY is a validation of the need to grant rights in advance to users, and of the CC-BY license in a truly Open Access service.
The launch of this Web service is a promising step towards further facilitating the dissemination and open exchange of information in the biological sciences. Precedings features submissions from biomedicine, chemistry and the earth sciences. The Web service fulfills the role of a preprint server but accepts a wider array of document types, including unpublished manuscripts, presentations, white papers and supplementary findings. Curators from Nature Publishing Group review all submissions. Acceptance is determined by the document’s relevancy to the field and legitimacy.
From Nature’s press release,
‘Helping scientists to communicate their ideas is central to Nature’s mission, and we are constantle seeking new ways to achieve this,” said Annette Thomas, Managing Director of Nature Publishing Group. “Precedings is an important new step for us and, we hope, the research community. We are particularly proud to have conceived and developed the service with the help of a group of such highly esteemed organizations; the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Science Commons, and the Wellcome Trust.’ […] “
More after the jump …