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Music Media

Open Source Music 107

Posted by michael from the put-your-money-where-your-mike-is dept.
X-Ross writes "As big labels battle it out in a Post-Napster world, open source comes to music ... Creative Commons has a feature on an open source style music site for artists launched by Sal Randolph. Here is the link to her site Opsound."
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Open Source Music More

Open Source Music

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  • Sounds like . . . (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @04:51PM (#6032158)
    . . . the perfect fit for hip-hop artists and samplers like Puff Daddy/P-Diddy. That is, if anyone contributes anything of any worth *)

    • Sounds like . . . (Score:5, Informative)

      by cscx ( 541332 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @06:05PM (#6032403) Homepage
      This is NOT NEW. I actually submitted a story about this a full year ago and it got rejected. In fact we have some of these folks on Slashdot right now. My radio station got this guy's [slashdot.org] CD in the mail... I thought the license was quite interesting so feel free to check out his site here: rootrecords.org [rootrecords.org]

      Although I do see a problem with this just as with some GPL software... how do you prove that your original source was ripped off by someone else, who is now making millions?
      • The whole point is that you don't care. Or rather, that you learn to live with it. That's why I've marked some of software 'All Rights Relinquished' which gets that sentiment across. In both ways.

        It's also very Taoistic of nature. Very Lao Tse's Tao Te Ching, which btw was written well over 2,500 years ago!

        Rulof
        • If someone is making millions on your work you aught to care. At least I do. I want a 10% cut damn it! I share my knowledge and my work, you share your wealth if you happen to make money on my knowledge and hard work. That is not too much to ask is it?

  • Take a look (Score:5, Informative)

    by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @04:53PM (#6032168) Journal
    If you take a look at the site, it seems to be mostly experimental music. This is stuff that is unlikely to have broad appeal (or large financial value), and is therefore very unlikely to be picked up by a label. Putting it in the public domain is therefore a very appropriate way of getting it out to interested people.
    • In other words, no one would buy it anyway.
      • That depends. One of the weirder things to happen to me is when I gave up music. I'd been putting a huge amount of work into trying to do pop/rock music with vocals and everything, struggling with the demands of it and not getting all that far. Then, I lost patience and said 'fuck it' and quit, and started playing with the accumulated gear, making long extended experimental weirdnesses with toys like 'MidiChaos' that were guaranteed not to make a tune.

        The second one I did, I've already sold two copies of t

  • Opensource music (Score:3, Funny)

    by Andreas(R) ( 448328 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @04:54PM (#6032175) Homepage
    There is nothing like the OpenBsd Song [openbsd.org]

    • Re:Opensource music (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      >>> There is nothing like the OpenBsd Song

      Which should have been released under the forbidden licence.

  • MP3 file format? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Steven Blanchley ( 655585 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @04:57PM (#6032190)
    If the purpose of this stuff is to be sampled and remixed and whatnot, isn't a lossless format like FLAC preferable to MP3 or Vorbis?

  • What's new about this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @04:58PM (#6032195) Homepage Journal
    There seems to be a multitude of sites already that provides this feature, or allow for sharing sounds in central or decentralized repositories. A few links can be found at http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Music/Sound_F iles/Samples_and_Loops/ [google.com] and much more by a quick keyword search or two.

    I'd rather use Gnutella and filter the searches on AIFF files.
    • Warning: Loops and samples you find through a quick google/kazaa search or on one of those "we assume everything uploaded to us is public domain" archives, are more likely than not rip-offs from copyrighted works or have not-for-profit licenses that people often forget to copy along with the sample.

      If you want to get samples that you can actually use without any fear of being sued, you have a much harder time. I have yet to find a single free sample archive on the web that takes copyright seriously.

  • "Pure" music distribution is on the horizon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ebusinessmedia1 ( 561777 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:05PM (#6032212)
    Little-by-little, musicians and producers are finding interesting new ways to distribute - and get paid for - their music. A recent model that has a band offering limited release recordings for a lot of money. They'll make their money on the first 100 subscribers, at $1200@, and then do another release, and so on. This is just one of dozens of new distribution ideas out there.

    http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_displa y. jsp?vnu_content_id=1859066

    The market is busy at work for optimal music distribution, and that market has already written the epitaph of the music majors.

    Innovative models like the above - including Opsound - are popping up all over the place. Soon there will be many ways to get the music content you want without having to deal with the majors.

    For artists however, the current system is random, in addition to being not-at-all profitable except for the very highest echelon artists - those that already have a recording success under their belt. Also, it's not often that that even successful artists can create one song after another that consistently please their fans. There is a lot of waste and inefficiency in the system.

    One long term answer to the above dilemma will be based on technologies that are currently in their infancy. Consumers will someday be able to know what elemental parts of a song - things like specific keys, harmonies, melodic structures, etc. appeal to them - really, appeal to those parts of their brain that cognate music in ways that please them.

    Once these technologies mature, music distribution will be geared more toward pleasing a specific cognitive taste. Services will be created to decipher and forward appropriate music to consumers for review, based on an analysis of their inherent cognitive tastes. Many of these models will be predictive, and be able to intelligently suggest what new music, from artists never before experienced, would be pleasing to a specific customer's ear.

    New technologies like the ones hinted at above will open up the international market for music. This will create a music distribution renaissance that dwarfs the current 'world' music and 'majors' scene.

    Corroborating some of the above - and looking forward to the near-long-term - music distribution is going to be singles-only, and probably based on a peer-to-peer system that results in a floating price for content. Content that is good, and in demand, will cost more than content that few people (relatively speaking) care about.

    All music distributed this way will have to be interoperable amongst many digital devices. If you buy the song file, it will be yours to do with as you please. Nothing else - long term - will work. There is no DRM system that can't/won't be broken.

    The only leverage that large music producers have at this time is legacy content. Consumers want access to that. Also, many major acts, hyped by the music distribution machine, are under contract and producing under the current system. Thus, current content is still in demand, but decreasing, as evidenced by the majors failure to produce as much of it as they did in the past [In their dying throes, the majors, via the RIAA, are attempting to blame their decrease in music CD production on illegal file-sharing - a proven red herring]

    The catch - for the majors - is that mostly everything from the legacy vaults is already recorded somewhere as Mp3's, or on CD/DVD w/o DRM. The same is happening to currently produced, and distributed, content. Unless the majors find a very smooth, seamless way to inexpensively distribute their content, their game is over - because everyone will soon have what they need from pirated sources. This will really be a shame if it happens; but the intransigent majors, lacking imagination, will only have themselves to blame.
    • Recorded music will cease to be sold for personal use. It will be free. DRM will fail. Musicians will make money from performance, advertising, corporate sponsorship, individual donations, and merchandising. Successful musicians will be rewarded far more than they are now, because better opportunities will exist for them to become popular without selling out. Businesses will exist to support successful musicians and not the other way around. Current major players will still be strong, because they are
    • At first, I was rather skeptical about what that Billboard link [billboard.com] you provided would include - I thought anything for $1200 is insanely expensive. Little did I know the amazing package Mister DiNizio had put together would include so much.

      Really, that is cool, and I don't see how he's making money on such a deal. For those that are too lazy to read and distill the link, $1.2k gets you:
      a limited-edition (100 copies made) album
      Other (semi-)unique albums, about 3 per year.
      a "a private 'living room concert' f

  • How to get open-source music (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:11PM (#6032225)
    - download openboyzband-0.2.3.tar.gz
    - tar -zxf openboyzband-0.2.3.tar.gz
    - cd ./2b3
    - make config
    - make single
    - make install_single
    - xmms 2b2.mp3
    *** core dump ***
  • So who is registering openboyband.org, openrock.org, openjazz.org, etc?

    Hopefully we'll also be lucky in that music will thrive or die like software; the craptastic open project like Open Boy Bands will die out. ;-)

  • Open source artists need publicity! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rjnagle ( 122374 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:15PM (#6032242) Homepage
    The site is getting slashdotted at the moment, but I think I already looked at the site before. It's a good idea, and I'm glad someone is trying it.

    I just noticed yesterday that to use music as background for a video or presentation, you need to "rent it" and that those fees are pretty steep. It is only the logical conclusion of royalty-based music distribution, but the end result is that artists are unable to use the cultural building blocks to make new things.

    People get in a panic about written copyright, but did you you ever stop and realize that no recorded music has yet fallen into the public domain? It would be one thing to say: you may listen/download/use only music that is in the public domain, but quite frankly, but up until very recently, there really hasn't existed any such kind of music. Some protections have been established for fair use and sampling, but individuals find it rather scary to risk the threat of litigation.

    The problem with mp3 "stealing" is not that you are stealing money from the record companies, but that you are ignoring those artists who have established liberal distribution rights. If individuals were required to pay "full price" for a download/mp3 (however ridiculous that might be), it would give groups like opsound a chance to be heard. If licensed music is as free as creative commons music, then the consumer sees nothing wrong with the current state of lawlessness. If however, licensed music were controlled by some sort of drm, the natural instinct of many people would be to ignore them and look for more alternative sounds. And I would argue that artists, viewing the tradeoffs, might be more inclined to choose putting music in the public domain (if it resulted in more publicity). The status quo gives no real advantages for charitable artists.

    I should mention that a wonderful book Digital Aboriginals [digitalaboriginal.com] talks about this issue, asking whether anyone can "own the wind."
    • Getting slashdotted? The sites (both Creative Comments and Opsound) are working fine for me. The sound files are all stored on other servers. If you're having trouble downloading them, try starting from an arbitrary position on the index instead of the beginning.

      If you need music for a video or presentation and don't want to spend a lot of money or work on it, you might find Microsoft Music Producer [musicmachines.net], perhaps the only Microsoft program I recommend without reservation, to be useful. You basically select a st
    • Apparently there is quite a lot of recorded music that's fallen into PD. There is a newsgroup devoted to it and a website that archives everything (legally posted) from the newsgroup. When I was last there, a couple years ago, the site's file list alone was over 2mb in plain HTML.

      That site is where I got a nice recording of Bessie Smith doing "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" (1929). I imagine it would come up on search (don't have the info on this machine).

  • This isn't new (Score:4, Informative)

    by FreeMars ( 20478 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:16PM (#6032251) Homepage

    I believe I prefer the model presented at http://penguinsong.net/net/intro [penguinsong.net]

    ...composers and artists maintain copyrights and are entitled to a small royalty. Sampling and modification of existing works is encouraged. It's all about the music, not the dollar.

  • Here is my favorite opensource band (Score:5, Funny)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:23PM (#6032268) Journal
    Scientist and gangster artist MCHawkings [mchawking.com]has free mp3's at his website. Its all about the theory of relativity [imarc.net] baby. Besides rapping he is also actively working [imarc.net] towards the unified field theory.

  • Open Source music?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:26PM (#6032275) Homepage Journal
    I've never really needed the original source for the music I reproduce, as I can play quite well by ear. I can reverse-engineer pretty much anything I hear on the radio or elsewhere.

    Aside from that, there is more than enough open-source music available for everyone's use, for free: Circle of fifths, A-minor scale, 1-4-5 blues chord progressions, things like that.

    (I'll admit that some of Frank Zappa's stuff is pretty heavily encrypted, but his family's been nice about not waving the DMCA at us.)

  • Wrong solution to the wrong problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MyNameIsFred ( 543994 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:32PM (#6032293)
    If a musician wants to freely distribute his work, he doesn't need an open source license. Plenty of musicians do that already within the current copyright law.

    The problem with Napster is that some musicians want to be rich. They want the big break. They want to be famous. So they sell their soul to the "Big Labels." The Devil is the Devil.

    • Re:Wrong solution to the wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:42PM (#6032323) Homepage Journal
      The problem with Napster is that some musicians want to be rich. They want the big break. They want to be famous. So they sell their soul to the "Big Labels." The Devil is the Devil.
      The problem with Napster is that some musicians want to eat. They want to pay bills. They want to stop flipping burgers. So they sell their soul for a loan against future earnings to the "Big Labels." The Devil is the Devil, but the musicians are just trying to get by.

      Payment for their songs is the only way they have to pay off those loans.

      • Payment for their songs is the only way they have to pay off those loans.

        You seem to have forgotten live performances. Granted, people will only pay to hear you live if you're a decent musician, but if you're not, you shouldn't be trying to make a living off music to begin with. And therein lies the problem: many 'independent' artists truly suck and do nothing original. So they get stuck playing at bars where nobody really listens, dreaming of getting their "big break". And the handful of decent musi

        • You seem to have forgotten live performances.

          No, I haven't. I'm in the concert production business. I know where the money goes, and how much. The vast majority of musical artists, in their zeal to 'put on the show of a lifetime', spend nearly all that they bring in at the gate on the production aspects (lighting, sound, video, pyro, labor, transportation) of the show. (Yes, I know the money winds it's way through promoters, agents, etc, but in short that's what happens.)

          If they are very lucky, enough

          • I go to a lot of concerts in small venues and from what I pick up from talking to the musicians the break even point seems to be about fifty or sixty in the audience for each band member. Most of these shows make do with the house lights and the show is watching great musicians at work. Now granted these concerts tend in genres that don't attract huge audiences, but the musicians are usually excellent and frequently include some of the best in the world.

            Most of these guys manage to make a decent living

            • Re:Maybe I'm Strange (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Ogerman ( 136333 )
              Most of these guys manage to make a decent living and have careers that span decades. So it possible to make a living from touring. Personally I don't want to see a light show unless it's a concert at a big venue where the intimacy of the small concert is lost.

              That's right on what I was trying to get at. Getting back to music for the sake of music itself! Forget the mega lightshow, pyro, ear-destroying SPL's, gargantuan mixing / digital re-processing booth, and smelly chewing-gum infested amphitheaters

  • All music is open source (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kuroth ( 11147 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:35PM (#6032305)
    When you listen to music, you're listening to the source code. There is no compiler. If you can hear it, you can reproduce it.

    *However*, if she *really* wanted to be open source in action as well as name, she'd have sheet music available for all of the works in the library. Unfortunately, I don't know how one would go about notating "dunkin donuts screaming match", "interferences between layers of random waveforms generate these blips and cracks", and whatever else the raver dopeheads are recording nowadays.

  • Let's not forget... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mikeNO@SPAMmikesmithfororegon.com> on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:52PM (#6032354) Homepage
    There's a wide variety of very good creative commons music available, if you happen to like classical, folk, blues, etc. While the recordings are still under copyright, the music itself may be performed, recorded, borrowed, modified, etc. by anyone, royalty-free.

  • A Musician's Standpoint (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NeoMoose ( 626691 ) <neomoose@@@despammed...com> on Saturday May 24, 2003 @05:56PM (#6032365) Homepage Journal
    When I look at this, as a musician, I see a flawed system. Sure, I support the concepts, but it simply doesn't have the same freedoms that an independant artist has come to expect and it doesn't have the money that the signed artists have come to expect.

    Why would I want to throw my material out there for free when I can make a little scratch selling it to the locals? Sure, I offer a lot of it up for free, thanks to the powers that I have as an independant, but the fact that I often give it out for free doesn't mean I should offer my stuff up like this.

    It's just impractical.
    • Basically, I am just trying to point out that all this is doing is throwing in another middleman.
      • The thing about middlemen? Sometimes they don't just get in the way. In this case, it's easier to go to one big warehouse for royalty-free content than it is to scour dozens of websites looking for exactly what you need.

        I understand that not everyone is going to want to release complete works into this pool of ideas. But if you found some of their content worthwhile, you may want to give back by contributing some of the sounds you collected as part of your work, or maybe an acoustic version of the so
        • You make a good point, but but but BUT BUUUUT -- experience has taught me that if you are good enough then word of mouth alone will get you noticed.
    • I think you might want to asl a better group of people (no offense /. crowd) like artists who do give music for free.
      Some have been doing it for over 10 years.
  • Since some people won't RTFA, and go straight to the opsound site...

    Sal Randolph is the woman behind Free Words [freewords.org], which you may have heard of, or seen the bright pink stickers for. In fact, most (if not all) of her work has been free-as-in-whatever-you-want, in a very concrete way, not just conceptually. As such, I think it may be more interesting to some of the geeks around here, even if you (like me), find the Opsound thing rather uninspiring.
  • Include works by RMS, such as the free hackers song?

  • Musicians are not ready. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @06:21PM (#6032499) Homepage
    In my experience, musicians are not ready for this concept. You would think that at least amateur musicians, who aren't making any money at all from their music, would see that sharing could be advantageous to all the members of a community, but most of them just don't seem to be able to wrap their minds around it. I think part of the problem is that most people have no real concept of what the free information movement is. If you try to talk to them about it, they think you're talking about warezing and sharing Christina Aguilera MP3s. Since they haven't heard of Linux, GNU, etc., they really don't have any positive examples that they can use to extrapolate what it would be like to have a community of people sharing free music.

    Most of the action in the world of free music is people making old, public-domain sheet music available on the web, sort of like Project Gutenberg does for books. Here [dmoz.org] is a relevant Open Directory category. (Just so you don't think I'm a total whiner, here [lightandmatter.com] is some PD music I've transcribed myself.)

  • Copyright ownership guarantees? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @06:26PM (#6032516) Homepage Journal

    If this is like any other online label, its TOS will require artists to guarantee that any musical works that they wrote and recorded are original. How can an artist guarantee that he did not accidentally copy a popular song? What specific steps can an artist take to avoid George Harrison's fate [columbia.edu]?

    • "What specific steps can an artist take to avoid George Harrison's fate?"

      Well, if you're really wealthy, you might try cryogenic freezing. Best not to wait until you die, since it would probably be much easier to repair and resuscitate a young, healthy body. And anyways, who wants to face our Glorious Utopian Future as a ninety year old man?

      Or just try not to get into a train wreck for about twenty years, and maybe something will come of all this genetic research.

      George Harrison will be greatly

      • Well, if you're really wealthy, you might try cryogenic freezing.

        <sarcasm style="voice-family: Daffy Duck">Ha-ha, very funny. Ha-ha, it is to laugh.</sarcasm>

        I did not link to an article about the death of George Harrison. Instead, I linked to an article describing a successful lawsuit against Harrisongs Music on grounds that George Harrison unconsciously copied a copyrighted musical work when writing "My Sweet Lord". How can songwriters learn from this mistake, and what steps can they ta

  • *random record scratching sounds* "He-he-hello .. my name is Lin-Lin-Linus .. and I pronounce Linux as Li-Li-Linux"

    Really tho, if OpenBSD can have there own song, so should Linux! ;)

  • copyleft (Score:4, Informative)

    by ratfynk ( 456467 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @06:50PM (#6032595) Journal
    Why not apply copyleft to sheet music. Here http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/ is an example of some one who already did. The archive which is left to his memory is a statement about the importance of the free dissemination of music script.
    Werner Icking was an inspiration to many musicians, especially in Europe.


    PD music needs more advocates like Iking. A project like Gutenberg only for music is what he tried to get started. His early death is all the more sad because there has been very little done to expand his idea since his death.

  • check out www.justablip.co.uk (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ant_tmwx ( 239616 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @07:17PM (#6032711) Homepage
    (disclaimer: I'm a part of blip)

    this is a perfect time to mention justablip recordings [justablip.co.uk], a new music label based in London. blip has been started by Thrash (Kris Weston), formerly of the Orb. it has been formed over his problems with the music industry & frustrations w/ large corporations that fund death [justablip.co.uk] & strangle your rights [justablip.co.uk]. Justablip music (electronic/experimental/washingmachinesexmusic) will be released under a free license [justablip.co.uk] (as yet undetermined).

    anyways, check out some of the articles [justablip.co.uk] that Thrash has written & see where he's coming from. there are no releases available for download, but they should be shortly, I think the first release may be a poke at Madonna that most people on here will enjoy. sign up at the website too.

    ant
    justablip director

  • Already doing it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jcsehak ( 559709 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @07:40PM (#6032790) Homepage
    Been doing it for like a year now. It looks like her stuff is just sounds and loops and stuff, in a big pool. At my site, you can listen to a CD (half-length) of real music, and download the individual tracks or each song if you want to remix it. I also wrote a new license, the OSML, which I based on the GPL.

    BTW, the site hasn't been updated in a while because I've been working on a new album. The whole site's gonna have a huge rebirth once I finish it.
  • the idea that i should want to release my music under an open source license is insulting. my music is an expression of my aesthetic preferences. giving unknown others the freedom to recontextualize it without my input is worse to me than selling my music to an advertiser for cash -- not only does it reduce a song's value aesthetically without any chance of control on my part, but it furthers the notion that music is not something businesses looking for a sound for their tv spot should have to pay for.

    alre

    • the idea that i should want to release my music under an open source license is insulting. my music is an expression of my aesthetic preferences. giving unknown others the freedom to recontextualize it without my input is worse to me than selling my music to an advertiser for cash -- not only does it reduce a song's value aesthetically without any chance of control on my part, but it furthers the notion that music is not something businesses looking for a sound for their tv spot should have to pay for.

      Th

    • No way!!! Its just like software and Open Source...give it away for free so the big companies can make money off of it without compensating you.

      You can always make money selling t-shirts!
  • Sometimes I mess around with making songs at home. I make beats with the computer and then layer other instruments over them. What I find very strange is that nobody has bothered to make a site with well-recorded precussion samples.

    What I'm looking for are various samples of well miked intividual drum hits and cymbal strikes. I've resorted to sampling these from various CDs I own, but it's very rare that you get a well-recorded strike that's allowed to fully ring out.

    There are many studios with good aco

  • Bookmarklet RIAA Detector (Score:4, Informative)

    by capedgirardeau ( 531367 ) on Saturday May 24, 2003 @08:04PM (#6032884)
    RIAA Radar [magnetbox.com]

    If you use Moz you can add a bookmarklet that will tell you if an album is distributed by an RIAA memeber.

    This is from their website:

    What is RIAA Radar?
    The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America.

    Neat.

  • Don't forget, there are other people out there who have been doing this for awhile too, such as the Open Music Registry [openmusicregistry.org].
  • Looks like people are taking this as "free" music rather than open source music. If it's open source, does it mean we can change it and then release it into the public again until it is "fit for the ear?"
    If it's really open sourced music, then maybe we can turn experimental music to pretty much commercial like music which a lot of people agree upon
  • ...are ours! Musicians of the world, unite!

    I can understand the apprehension of professional musicians at this stuff. One answer is that the revenue stream may have to shift towards performance rather than recording sales.

    For the hobbyists, closet musicians, and mad scientists relentlessly twisting knobs on hopelessly complicated Reaktor synths, this is great. I've been trying to get something like this going among my friends for a while now.

    When I think of the origins of music, I think of a bunch of p

  • This is pretty unrelated to this article but oh well. I was thinking, there should be a software liscence like music is. When someone preforms a song, you have the source to that song. You can figure out the notes and the words. However, you cant just go out and make money by stealing the words or music. This is how it should be with software. You should be able to have the source, and mess around with it but you shouldnt be able to sell it or give it back to the community or anything. You should be able t
  • A related site [magnatune.com]
    I hope to see more of these popping up on the web soon.
  • How can music be "open source"? I've never seen music source code before... Perhaps they mean free for personal/noncommercial use? Or even public domain?

    • I've never seen music source code before

      Have you ever walked into a store that sells musical instruments? Most such stores stock sheet music, which can be considered a form of musical source code.

      Have you ever looked at a MIDI file? MIDI files are tokenized representations of musical source code.

  • on my way to work yesterday, I was listening to the newest bright eyes [saddlecreekrecords.com] album and got to thinking about how plausible an open source band would be. in my estimation, as far as rock/punk is concerned (electronic music, by and large, is pretty much open source, at least for live mixes), it would end up being the modern equivalent to protest songs...and not the kind being offered up by system of a down, either. someone would write a song, someone else would hear it, and play a cover, but make some slight chan
  • I am myself working on Classiccat.net [classiccat.net], an index of classical music on the internet. Some of the music is hosted by the artists themselves, others are on mp3.com, Vitaminic, etc. I don't care under what license people release their music. They make it available to listen to freely and that is all that most people care about.

    When I look at free music I see the cost of hosting as the main obstacle. Unfortunately up to now their isn't opensource software to help this. Stuff like BitTorrent doesn't give the ori

  • Ok, this is both karma-whoring and shameless plugging. All in just one comment! :-)

    I did some kind of "music CD" by myself too, which I called Random Stuff [xouba.net]. It's me playing guitar (no, it's not shred) and using samples for the backings. And it's free (as in beer and as in speech) for everyone to download (mp3 format now, but ogg are in the works) and use. So you could say, to some extent, that it's "open source music". It has some limitations, anyway:

    • You can download my music and redistribute it freely
  • It's a nice idea, but Ozzy would probably say "Who the fuck gives a fuck".

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