We’ve been following Magnatune since it launched in 2003 as a record label that embraced the net, including giving fans the legal right to do what comes naturally given the net — share an remix music noncommercially — by offering all label music under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. At the time a fairly radical…

Three stories from the Creative Commons music world came across our radar recently, each showcasing a different facet of how our licenses are used to expose artists, encourage collaboration, and promote commercial avenues for freely-licensed works. First comes news today that The Everybody, a new project from Joey Santiago and David Lovering (guitarist and drummer…

Indaba Music, an international community of musicians, music professionals, and fans exploring the creative possibilities of making music with people in different places, has been up to some pretty impressive stuff since being founded just a few years ago. We’re honored to have Daniel Zaccagnino and Matthew Siegel, the company’s co-Founders, write the fifth letter…

This Monday, we began a guest curation series at our Free Music Archive portal. Rather than attempt to distill the vast landscape of CC-licensed music on our own, we thought it better to reach out to those on the ground working to support and expose these type of artists in their given communities. What better…

CASH Music, a nonprofit organization that builds “open tools and services to benefit artists and music organizations”, recently launched its first fundraiser in conjunction with a number of amazing artists and labels. An online raffle is at the core of their efforts with some incredible prizes available ranging from signed sheet music to vinyl test…

Net label and music licensing company Beatpick has teamed up with Umedia, an Italian start-up, to provide Creative Commons-licensed music for Universication, a new TV series focusing on media and technology within the Italian university system. The show is broadcast across Italy, meaning that around 130 CC-licensed tracks will be played on Italian National TV…

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…

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…

It has been just over four months since the Free Music Archive launched as a destination for high-quality, freely licensed music. Since that time, the site has developed an avid community and grown to include a number of fantastic curators all while expanding upon the site’s initial catalog to host over 11,000 tracks. All told,…

Beginning this past March, John Wood has written, recorded, mixed, and mastered an album a month. Distributed under the moniker Learning Music Monthly, the music arrives on the first of the month as CDs in subscribers’ mailboxes and MP3s in their digital lockers, all released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. Offering a tiered subscription service…