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Music Media

Creative Commons Remix Contest 65

Posted by michael from the free-and-clear dept.
victors writes "Creative Commons and WIRED recently went public beta with CC Mixter which is a Commons pool for music samples and remixes. The site creates a tree of remix/sources inline with every entry and has Flikr/del.ciou.us style tagging. The launch includes two remix contests and features samples and cuts put in the Commons by Chuck D., Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Danger Mouse and tons more. The winners end up on Chuck D.'s next CD and a CC promo disk and there's already been some pretty astounding entries. Of course every upload is under a CC license that allows legal sampling including contest entries and the big name source tracks and samples. I took over the coding for the site from Lucas Gonze (of WebJay) who did a proof of concept. We're currently working on making the site source part of the CC Tools open source project. That version will support remixing of any media including images, videos and Flash mods."
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Creative Commons Remix Contest More

Creative Commons Remix Contest

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  • If not, wouldn't that violate the whole non-commercial use part of the CC agreement?
    • No. Chuck D and/or the record label is the copyright holder, and they can license that content however they wish.
      • I think you mistake and the parent is right.

        Chuck D is the copyright holder of his track on the Wired CD, but he isn't the copyright holder of the remixed tracks. He isn't the copyright holder of samples of the beastie boys that can be used in a Chuck D remix on CC Mixter.

        • Chuck D is the copyright holder of his track on the Wired CD, but he isn't the copyright holder of the remixed tracks.

          I suspect that the remixed track(s) will be available for free (CC or Chuck's website), whereas Chuck's own album will be a commercial product.

          • yes but the website says (or said before it was slashdotted) that the winner track will be included on the chuck D cd. So that's clearly a commercial use of CC content.

            Maybe they suppose that the winner will allow Chuck D to use his track ?!

            • Maybe they suppose that the winner will allow Chuck D to use his track ?!

              I imagine that this is an explicit part of the "contract" agreed to by participating in the remix contest. You remix Chuck's song. You are some pseudo copyright holder, with a "free for all" type license attached to it. This gets included on the CD, but is also available for free download, thus fulfilling the "free for all" part. Chuck also includes the song on his CD -- permission granted somewhere in the CC remix contest -- wh

            • Maybe I'm missing something here. What is the big deal of remixing something?

              How about going out and creating new and original music? Taking other people's work and mixing, splicing, etc...just really doesn't seem much like talent to me...

              • Good ol' /. l33t-ism!

                Define "new" and "original", first of all.

                In many cases, I would guess the vast majority of cases, "new" music isn't actually new. Seriously, think about it. Unless you've heard EVERYTHING that's been produced, you can't determine whether something is new or not.

                You might think its new, but there's a good chance someone, somewhere, in their basement, garage, club, whatever, wrote a very similar song using a very similar chord progression, beat, and very similar lyrics.

                If I write a "
                • despite the parent being totally off-rocker on remix culture, he does have a point. remixes are typically works-for-hire, so the original artist retains copyright on the remix recording.
                • I guess I mean by new and original music. NOT sampling someone else's work. Writing and playing your own music is to me...talent. Sampling another artists recorded efforts and messing around with it...to me...not talent. If 'anyone' could do it...to me...can't be talent.

                  Hell, give me the time and hardware, and I could remix stuff....if I could do it...well, you know..

                  That's mainly my point. Taking samples of someone's recorded efforts, putting a different beat around it, and maybe shouting out some semi-

                  • I think you have a lot of misconceptions about music.

                    First, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any musician who didn't do something that another did. There are so many examples to cite...probably the most overused (in the rock genre, anyway) would be Led Zeppelin ripping off just about every blues artist there ever was prior to 1968 or so. Would you say that Led Zeppelin is untalented? Would you say Jimmy Page in his heyday was a lousy guitarist?

                    Second, you seem to believe that only certain things can
                    • Well, I'd admit...I believe that the words 'Rap' and 'Music' are mutually exclusive terms...

                      But, aside from that...I know that Zeppelin and the Stones and such 'lifted' a good deal from previous artists. But, taking tunes, runs, and riffs...and playing it yourself to make new music...that is still original to me. Yes, especially in music, one generation builds on the music from the previous one. You get continuity and growth that way. In fact, I think somewhere in the late 80's...this continuity was someho

              • From Chuck D's perspective, I don't think that this has a much to do with remixing as sampling in general. Now, there is an artistic aspect to remixing itself. For example, see what DJ Danger Mouse did with Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatle's White Album before it was shut down.

                But either way, a large part of Chuck D's success with Public Enemy was the music produced by the Bomb Squad on their It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet albums. On those albums, the Bomb Squad

                • See my answer above...

                  I guess I don't see the talent in people 'sampling' other peoples work...why not spend the time learning to play an actual instrument, and compose, and sing? Stealing or using with permission other people's efforts and talent by sampling, to me just isn't talent. I think most anybody with time and equipment could take existing sounds, songs and such from existing recordings...and re-do them. If anyone can do such a thing...to me...not talent.

                  • Me: been playing music for 40 years. Cello, guitar, piano, bass and now computer and turntable. Graduated from music conservatory, scored films, played countless gigs in rock, blues, reggae, casuals, lounge, weddings, bar mitzvah, folk, avante-garde, symphonic outfits. Written music for singers, small combos, big bands, 80 piece orchestras. Worked for record companies for 15 years including Columbia, Epic, Rhino. Currently have a recording contract with Magnatune, posted over 100 tracks to my website and tw
              • Yup, you are missing something. Check out CC Mixter's tagline -- "mixversation".

                Remixing is about bouncing ideas back and forth, getting in a conversational flow, a jam approach that isn't done in real-time. It's like a mailing list or a forum. Here and there you see really cool things, the rest of the time it's just people talking.

              • Maybe I'm missing something here. What is the big deal of remixing something?

                How about going out and creating new and original music? Taking other people's work and mixing, splicing, etc...just really doesn't seem much like talent to me...

                By your logic, every mixing engineer out there is doing something that's "not a big deal" and requires no talent. After all, all they're doing is taking other people's work (the tracks recorded by the band) and mixing, splicing, (and balancing, and arranging, and addin
                • "By your logic, every mixing engineer out there is doing something that's "not a big deal" and requires no talent. After all, all they're doing is taking other people's work (the tracks recorded by the band) and mixing, splicing, (and balancing, and arranging, and adding effects, and creating a proper stero image, and creating the proper dynamics, and making sounds "fit" together into a cohesive whole), etc to make a song. That doesn't seem much like talent to you..."

                  Not really...in general, I do believe

            • Re:Is Chuck D.'s next CD going to be free? (Score:5, Informative)

              by boodaman ( 791877 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:11PM (#11349500)
              You're not getting it.

              The Creative Commons license doesn't say anything about prohibiting commercial use of content. In fact, depending on which Creative Commons license you choose, commercial use is explicitly allowed.

              You might want to check out the Creative Commons site, which explains the different licenses very clearly.

              In short, an artist can retain copyright and control of a song, but allow others to freely use parts of the song (or all of the song) as long as they comply with certain restrictions. Sometimes, those restrictions include not using the song for commercial gain without the copyright holder's consent.

              If the license covering the uploaded remixes is something like the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license, then the uploaded remix can be used commercially provided the person using it gives attribution to the author and allows distribution using the same license.

              You might want to check the Creative Commons site...there's lots of info there. In short, depending on the license covering the uploaded remix, there's nothing at all preventing Chuck D from including the remix in a commercial distribution.
        • ok, here's how it really works:

          1) the chuck d track that to be remixed under a NON-COMMERICAL CC license, which means you can't re-sell the work without his permission.

          2) the remix made by a CC Mixter person is owned by the remixer but subject to whatever restrictions apply to samples they use (including the nc-cc license)

          3) Only Chuck D samples are allowed for the Chuck D contest, not any of the other Wired artists

          4) If I read the contest rules correctly, the contestant waives royaltees to his/her song
        • Typically the original artist has the copyright on a remix, actually, so yes, he probably is still the copyright holder.

  • Slashdotted already...? Too bad. :-(
  • There's a similar bicardi breezer mixer also done in Flash, I personally think it's good as a toy (Flash, that is), not as anything you can seriously use. It's powered by ECMA script, after all.

  • The Beastie Boys? David Byrne? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dagny Taggert ( 785517 ) <[hankrearden] [at] [gmail.com]> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @10:50AM (#11348319) Homepage
    I enjoy their music, but how are struggling musicians supposed to make a living with CC? Maybe I don't get it, but these guys can afford to give their stuff away now...I can't.
    • They have to perform a lot. Many bands that give away their albums on mp3 would like the increase their popularity so that next time they're in town you will go see their concert/performance.
      Anyway, doing a couple of CC tracks doesn't mean you can't release a regular full album later that might score increased sales because of the band/group's exposure by the CC tracks.

    • Re:The Beastie Boys? David Byrne? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dcarey ( 321183 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @11:07AM (#11348448) Homepage
      I understand your situation is different if you are making music for a living, but in recent times there has been such a surge of amateur musicians who are technologically-savvy.

      Take me for example. I had the unfortunate realisation at age 25 that I was not going to be a rock and roll star, so I switched gears and got a CS degree. But I told myself that I would always make music, but it would have to be in hobby form from now on. Fortunatley with a CS degree I would be able to afford some nice toys for that hobby (at least in theory ...)

      Well it worked, and I'm now in the process of recording an album. No, Island records has not flown me to NY for a posh recording session with cameos by Steven Tyler, but I make great sounding music recording the album 100% digitally, with not much $$ invested, thanks to technologies like this (heck, the software was free -- Garageband).

      The point is many people like me who always wanted to record in a studio now can -- they can build one that is relatively inexpensive -- and those are the type of people that enjoy tools like this.

      I would not be surprised in the future if we see a few people out there who were working professionals who suddenly become famous for musical works they did as a hobby with no intention of making it big in the first place.
      • I am in a very similar situation. I have pretty much no formal training and I have completed 4 albums at 26... the last one entirely on my laptop. Not to say that I am exceptional, not at all... but simply that music composition has become very affordable and approachable. I'm tempted to say that you no longer even need to be tech-savvy, a good ear and a fair sense of harmony can be enough--things that can be aquired simply by having listened to music all your life, which most of us do.

        Now, of course not
    • Let me be clear---I'm not a musician. But I do not give away the services I perform and we shouldn't expect musicians to do the same. I should've been more clear. Poser? Ummm, OK Asshat.
      • Hey, take a pledge then:

        "I will not use anything that I obtain at no financial cost to myself or where the creator of the thing recieves no financial reward for my use of the thing."

        Something along those lines. Feel free.

    • Sometimes just getting your track sampled and looped in someone else's can expose your music to other audiences. Besides, if it's not a super hot/top ten track, which you could license for big cha-ching, why not let it go. This seems analogous to letting folks d/l your back catalog for free (or some nominal fee), because you're not expecting to make much money off sales for those albums (you've either already made your money or you haven't - of course there are notable exceptions a la Pink Floyd's Dark Side
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • "There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone."

      - Duke Ellington

    • The idea of being a struggling musician is a bogus way of thinking. The practice of music is not about hustling to become a star. It's about making music constantly, and once in a while making some money on it.
    • Well, there are sites out there such as http://www.ind-music.com/ [ind-music.com] that allow Indie Artists to upload and sell there music. The accounts are free to join. The site does take a commission, but the artists earns more as they sell more songs. I think CC is a great place, but really unless you are an established act, you really don't stand a chance.
  • I can't figure out if I should really be so stoked that the artists on are really 'on the bandwagon' with CC licensing. It seems after a few spins of that disc that it's filled with cast-off and b-side quality material. If they're so hot on it, why no release some of the good stuff under CC?
    • For sampling purposes, it doesn't really matter if you have the A-side or B-side tracks from a particular artist, you can assume (most) all the tracks were made with the same hardware setup and went through the same mastering, and will be of similar quality. Those B-sides are going to have perfectly usable drum kit and other miscellaneous samples as long as it's of acceptable quality. Having a license to sample an A-side track is only really useful if you want to make a remix of that particular song.
      • I was actually referring to the 'quality' as how good the tracks were, not to the actual recording quality/production of the tracks. i realize this may be flamebait for some, but, in short, those are hardly what i would consider good material from any of those artists, with respect to what i've heard from any of the artists earlier catalog.

        It just seems like maybe those tracks may have been considered throwaways or non-LP cuts that were released under CC because they may not have been considered commerci

  • do you know how old "re-mixed" material is? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @10:51AM (#11348327) Journal
    The Feb issue of Scientific American [sciam.com] has an editorial on the history of the idea of copyrights...it begins with a terse description of how Shakespeare borrowed most of Romeo&Juliet:
    If William Shakespeare were working today on Broadway or in London's West End, he would be spending a lot of time with lawyers. The Bard adapted Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which Brooke, in his turn, had based on a French translation by Pierre Boaistuau of various Italian stories. The history of creative works, whether Romeo and Juliet or the Beastie Boys' "Pass the Mic," is a chronicle of "borrowing" from others. Intellectual property lawyers might use a harsher word. But the framers of the Constitution always intended to provide owners of creative works with only limited monopolies, ensuring that the public gets the right to fashion new works from old..

    • Re:do you know how old "re-mixed" material is? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:11PM (#11348785) Homepage Journal
      ensuring that the public gets the right to fashion new works from old..

      As Newton said, "If I have seen further, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants" (or something to that effect).

      Without "borrowing" or creative re-interpretation, most creative efforts will wither and die. Not surprisingly, the artists understand this and agree with this; it is the media companies which are the roadblocks. To them, art is just a product that needs to be sold to the masses; it doesn't matter how it is produced, as long as noone else "steals" it (just like Nike doesn't care where the sneakers are made and who makes them).

    • In fact, among most critics of any major art form (literature, music, painting, etc.) the current consensus seems to be that in order to make truly innovative art you have to deliberately inherit and alter what your artistic forefathers have done. Harold Bloom's [wikipedia.org] The Anxiety of Influence [stanford.edu] is the standard text on the subject.
    • The Bard adapted Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke's poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which Brooke, in his turn, had based on a French translation by Pierre Boaistuau of various Italian stories.

      Whoa.... I thought he adapted it from his first idea of "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter."

    • Re:do you know how old "re-mixed" material is? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:17PM (#11348882) Journal
      And I think it is worth emphasizing, especially to purists [typically with little creative work to their credit] that slam plagerism, that it is the remix, Shakespeare's derivative work, that has been esteemed the greater work of art by 300 years of critics, teachers and audiances, not the work of Brooke. I would venture that the one moment in history when any work of literature or music is "perfected" occurs only in the mind of the artist and only at the point when he or she ceases fussing with the product. From that moment on, others may find a way to make the result more appealing or more compelling or just plain better at least to some audiance in some particular time and culture.
    • If you're interested in that idea, you may also want to check out a remarkable paper by Raphael Rubenstein that was published in American Poetry Review five years ago, called "Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing" [ubu.com]. Rubenstein traces a long and rich literary tradition of "remixes" that re-appropriate and recombine "found words" into new creations.
    • The story for Othello has its own convoluted story. Shakespeare based his play on a translation of an Italian short story (there also existed some poetry on the same), which was itself semi-historical. Desdemona is beaten to death with a sock full of sand (Iago suggests that this won't leave bruises), of all things.
  • Creative Commons isn't the only site where every song is licensed under a CC license. A number of great music sites are providing a great collection of amateur songs, all under one version or another of the CC licenses.

    E.g., MacJams.com [macjams.com]

  • Chuck D. did this on Revolverlution. (Score:4, Informative)

    by cant_get_a_good_nick ( 172131 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:02PM (#11348678)
    I kind of think of Revolverlution as an open source album. Public Enemy released a few of their tracks on a website, and had a contest for the best remix. The best one got on the CD once it was pressed.

    PE has been in the forefront of digital music releases for some time now. Def Jam wouldn't release "Bring the Noise 2000", so PE released it online. Def Jam sued, said they owned all rights to PE music, even though this was all remixes, and didn't want to sell it anyway. In the resultant dust-up, Chuck and Flav split from Def Jam, released the single "Swindler's Lust" for free to show their anger at being owned, and helped in the start of Atomic Pop, what was one of the first Internet focused labels. Atomic Pop released "There's a Poison Going On" (with Swindler's Lust) for $8 download only, $10 pressed, with an autograph from Chuck. They eventually folded, and it was weird seeing "Poison" at Virgin for $18 when I got it for $10. Chuck still has some links from http://www.rapstation.com/ [rapstation.com] and http://www.bringthenoise.com/ [bringthenoise.com] used to be a PE oriented site, now looks like Fark for Hip-Hop news.

  • Flikr/del.ciou.us? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kenrod ( 188428 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:17PM (#11348874)
    Flikr/del.ciou.us

    I hate it when I slam my head into the keyboard too.
  • An SQL error has occured. Please see error.log for details.


    It sounds a little bit like a computer fan crossed with some keyboard clicking on a bit of a crashter tip.
  • All of the ccmixter.org links are returning SQL errors--definately a server-side problem. Are there mirrors of these audio files? It would be best if there were Ogg Vorbis copies of these audio tracks elsewhere.
  • So. Do you think anyone will point out that Chuck D. and the Beastie's were the only ones on the previous CC album that chose a license that didn't allow commercial sampling? Think the'd give 'em create here for contibuting stuff to be sampled?

  • Nothing like shameless self-promotion... (Score:3, Funny)

    by greyfeld ( 521548 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @03:08PM (#11351112) Journal
    to bring your site to a grinding halt.
  • Boston's fun, funny, hip, and technologically-aware Jim's Big Ego did this in May 2004. Their song, "Mix Tape," makes some good statements about the RIAA. Several contest entries and the original song and component tracks are available for download.

    http://www.bigego.com/egog/article.php?story=20040 504090919481 [bigego.com]

    http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4162 [creativecommons.org]

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