Editors' Blogs

While we’re on the subject of mind-bending new ideas that mess with your head (were we? In this blog, always!), kindly allow me to introduce you to the strange and wonderful world of Creative Commons music. It’s a useful form of licensing that can help you promote your music effectively while retaining legal ownership of what you’ve created... or it can take you in unexpected and liberating new directions.

The essence of Creative Commons, a worldwide movement defining a new form of legally recognized copyright protection (and not just for music), is simple: “Some Rights Reserved.” When you put out a product with a CC license on it, you’re reserving some of your rights as the creator of the product, and releasing others to the world. How many rights you release, and what they constitute, depends on the license you choose, and a trip to the Creative Commons website will help you quickly learn and understand the differences between the six different CC licenses.

In very simple terms, when you put a CC license on a work, the one thing that can never be negotiated or removed is attribution. Your work is yours, and must be credited as such. No one can claim it for themselves or neglect mentioning it’s yours without breaking the license. Beyond that, you can decide if someone can take your work and use it in their own products (in musical terms, perhaps in a remix or a cover version), or whether to allow people to sell works based on yours for commercial gain.

The most common CC license you’ll see in the world of music, though, is the most restrictive: The Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. Under this license, a piece of music you release must be credited to you; it can’t be remixed or altered in any way; and anyone who has it can pass it along for free but can’t charge for it without getting permission from you first. In other words, music released under this license is legally yours, even to sell or let someone else sell if you decide that’s okay... but otherwise, it’s free to share far and wide.

Okay, so there’s a legal framework for giving your music away. Why would you want to?

Well, that’s a thorny topic that’s gotten me into some pretty heavy discussions in various music forums where I hang out. The argument against CC goes something like this: People pour huge amounts of effort into making music that an audience is expected, and hopefully willing, to pay for. With music piracy on the rise and ignorant folks embracing the false idea that anything you can steal off the Internet is okay to steal, isn’t it irresponsible to put a label on music that says, “Here, it’s free, take it!”? Or at the very least, doesn’t putting music out there for free imply that it’s not very good in comparison to the stuff you’re expected to pay for—in other words, if it doesn’t cost, how good could it be?

I do my best to unravel the many issues tangled up in this problem and set them aside. When we’re talking about sharing music legally for free, we are not talking about piracy, or people’s financial expectations, or quality, or pride of purpose, or pride of ownership, or the state of the music industry as it is now or even as it was before the Internet came along—we are talking about sharing music legally for free. And when people look at me and ask why, I tend to smile, shrug, and say, “Why not?”

Where is it written that commercial value is the only measure of a song’s worth? Does anyone honestly believe that a song is only good if you charge money for it—regardless of whether or not anyone wants to pay your price? If a thousand people download, hear, and love an album the creator has put out for free, is it still worthless compared to an album the creator slaps a large price tag on and demands people pay for?

There are lots of reasons to decide to make a musical work available for free. If you must have one that makes some kind of financial sense, consider it a goodwill gesture to your audience, a “thank you” for their support and an encouragement to get the word out and help you sell more CDs.

In some cases, a work released under a CC license can exist, legally, in two versions side by side, one being sold commercially and one that's free. My favorite example is Nine Inch Nails, whose fantastic albums Ghosts I-IV and The Slip are available either as limited-edition packaged discs you can buy in stores, or (in whole or in part) as free downloads you can get right from the NIN website, which states (in the case of the latest album): “The Slip is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.” Note that this license also appears on the packaged CDs; the copyright owner has decided he doesn't mind your sharing his work around, since you were kind enough to support him by buying the package you hold in your hands. The goodwill generated, and the creative possibilities of a world of NIN fans creating cool new music based on the material in those two albums, outweighs the knee-jerk reflexive need to keep full control over the material and not let anyone "mess with it." To which I say, bravo, Mr. Reznor.

And if you're willing to get past the promotional/commerce-related aspects of Creative Commons, the landscape becomes ever more alien... and ever more beautiful. Sometimes a creator might finish a work and listen back to it and simply say, “You know, I’d like people to be able to hear this—my fans will certainly get a kick out of it—but I’m not sure it warrants a full workup into a sellable product. I could put it on a shelf and hope someone finds and releases it someday when I’m rich, famous, and dead... or I can let people have it now. Why not?”

That’s the revenue stream I follow. In addition to the CDs I sell on CD Baby and the tracks you can download from iTunes or other sources, I have, as soloist and bandleader, four full albums (and more on the way) of music I’ve just plain decided to release for anyone who wants to hear it. My fans love to snap up my free releases, and if anything I’ve seen my paid downloads and albums sales increase from the added exposure.

And then there’s what I regard as the purest expression of this philosophy: some people make music and would like others to hear it, and just plain don’t care about making money. They do it for love—not a love that motivates them to get out and succeed at music making (for financial as well as other reasons), but a love that lets them express themselves and create beauty and never worry if they don’t see a single dime for it. And there is nothing implicit in that choice that makes their music of poorer quality than what’s being played on the radio and sold in stores.

Now there's a scary thought... a world full of music given away for free that just might be as good, or better, than what you’re being asked to shell out for. But it’s there. Why not?

I could double the size of this blog just by mentioning a small fraction of the netlabels out there: online record labels that provide freely distributable music as downloads, in all manner of genres from all around the world. But in the interest of brevity, I’ll suggest that you do a Web search on the words “free music netlabel” and see what pops up, and direct you to three sites in particular:

1. the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that offers access to (among other things) over a quarter of a million songs, all free;

2. Netlabels.org, a clearing house for free music of all kinds, catalogued by genre; and, because after all this blog is (at least partly) about me,

3. Earth Mantra, a netlabel of experimental and ambient electronic and electroacoustic music with over sixty free releases from amazing artists ranging from the relatively unknown to the world-famous... including a couple of mine.

Enjoy exploring, downloading, and sharing this music, all free of legal issues or guilt. I won't lie... it's not all of good quality by any means, and you should expect to shuffle through a lot of crap to find the good stuff. But that risk holds, to only a slightly lesser extent, in the world of music you pay for.

Wouldn't it be amazing to discover a whole universe of music you never knew existed, which is yours to download, share, and enjoy, not only without cost but without legal entanglements or guilt, just for the sheer joy of sharing music? Well, it's out there, and you owe it to yourself to take some time and go exploring it.