This week, the Grammy Awards nominations were announced – and, for the first time, a Creative Commons-licensed track and album are on the list. Nine Inch Nails’ “34 Ghosts IV” is nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, while the album that track appears on, Ghosts I-IV, is up for Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition…

Former Wilco member Jay Bennett is an incredibly talented singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer who has just put out his fifth solo album, Whatever Happened I Apologize, as a free download under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license. For the release, Bennett is working with Rock Proper, an online distributor of CC-licensed music. The company has…

My friends in the hip-hop/electronic trio Restiform Bodies recently announced a remix contest to celebrate the release of their new album, TV Loves You Back, on anticon records. All of the acapella tracks from the album are offered under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, so you can sample them, remix them, and mash them up.…

Tribe Of Noise, a community driven music site that uses a CC BY-SA license for all uploads, recently launched a new project, One Billion Fans, to help promote their growing pool of artists. Musicians, fans, and companies can all log in to support their favorite artist over the coming months with the winner being featured…

One of the things we’ve become very interested in finding more examples of are creators who are using our licenses in combination with traditional business models. For example, many musicians (including our recent Commoner Letter author Jonathan Coulton) sell copies of their CC-licensed music. This may seem cognitively dissonant but in practice it makes perfect…

Kraftwerk by greenplastic875 | CC BY German electronic-music pioneers Kraftwerk were told yesterday by a judge in Germany that a two-second sample used by a producer in Germany did not infringe on their copyright. From the BBC (emphasis added): The ruling overturns an earlier decision against Moses Pelham’s use of a short sample from Metal…

When the French music group Petit Homme signed a special contract with Sacem, the French collecting society for music composers, some saw the contract’s exclusion of the group’s internet rights as a step towards compatibility between collecting societies and CC: authors could control of their internet rights while collecting societies would handle the remaining rights…

We just received some tremendously exciting news. Democracy Now! – the daily news program broadcast by hundreds of radio and television stations around the world (it’s also the source of a very popular podcast) – is now being offered under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. This includes not only new episodes, but also those in…

Magnatune, the terrific sharing-friendly record label that we’ve talked about many times before, has announced a transition from a per-album purchase model to a “DRM-free, all-you-can-eat, pay-what-you-want” model. Label founder John Buckman spelled out the details in a blog post today. Memberships to Magnatune are now: 1) no commitment: one month at a time, whereas…

There’s more action at the online home of Into Infinity (see this previous post for a full description of the project). The new automated “nesting” page pulls in visual pieces of the show at random and embeds them within one another to create interesting combinations. Sometimes the results don’t quite make sense together, but I’ve…