Artists!

The US Congress is about to pass an internet censorship bill written by the copyright and corporate music and film lobbies, claiming that this bill is written in your name to “protect creativity.” The law would allow the government or corporations to censor entire sites — they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

In fact, PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are backed and largely written by the Hollywood film industry, namely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is trying to sell goods and ideas that are already free. Continue reading

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Support this project. Parts 2 & 3 after the break. Continue reading

Musopen is a non-profit library of copyright free music. This project will use your donations to purchase and release music to the public domain. Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn’t be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted. There is a lifetime of music out there, legally in the public domain, but it has yet to be recorded and released to the public.

This isn’t just a crazy idea: we’ve done this before using donations from our website, but now we want to tackle something much more ambitious. Continue reading

RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Filmmakers in attendance for Q&A) :: June 19-30, 2009; 10:00 pm :: 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY (Tickets).

In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. Continue reading

FUTURE OF MUSIC COALITION presents D.C. Policy Day 2009 at National Geographic Music and Radio and National Geographic Live! :: February 11, 2009.

This daylong event brings together leading voices to debate how changes in the policymaking landscape could impact the music community. Scheduled just two weeks after the start of a new federal administration, the event brings laser-beam focus to the core issues emerging in the courts, in Congress, at the FCC and the Copyright Office. With three panels, two keynote speeches and a special conversation, Policy Day 2009 will provide musicians, technologists, legal experts, policymakers and advocates with the opportunity to participate in robust but balanced discussions about how media and broadband policy affect the music industry, and how changes in copyright law could impact the music and tech communities. Continue reading

[Image: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, ca. 1941] Song of Solomon — by Ralph Borland and Julian Jonker — is an aleatoric audio collage and 8-channel installation that samples many versions of Mbube, aka Wimoweh aka The Lion Sleeps Tonight, in a sonic tribute to the song’s dead author Solomon Linda. By fragmenting and reordering compositional fragments of this ‘song of songs’, the installation questions the assumptions about compositional innovation and imitation that inform Western intellectual property law. In this jungle of sounds, the dead Author rests.

Continue reading

From the The Future Of Music (June ’06) – New Artist Model: It used to cost a lot of money to record and promote new music. Artists struggled like hell to find a patron to support them (i.e. a label). Everything was controlled and only a few artists became stars. That was the major label system. Most artists learned quickly when the recording advance money ran out that they needed other sources of income like performing, songwriting and the sales of merchandise to survive.

The new artist model says anybody can make and distribute a recording. It is much less expensive to make a record today and recorded music is only going to become less valuable to everyone over time. The real hard part is promotion. The true nemesis of the artist is obscurity. There is a glut of music out there and the situation is only going to get worse. This is the reality of the future of music, abundance and saturation. Continue reading

From Genome Technology Online July 30, 2007: If a Patented Gene Appears in a Song, Who Gets the Royalty?

Sure, genetic music was the out-of-left-field offshoot of the Human Genome Project, but we can’t deny that the field — such as it is — has shown surprising longevity. If you have a free minute, check out this newly issued patent. It covers “music generated by decoding and transcribing genetic information within a DNA sequence into a music signal having melody and harmony,” according to the abstract. The inventors listed are a couple of lawyers (hence the title of this post). Continue reading

For my inaugural post to this blog, I’d like to write about something I’ve been thinking about lately, and hopefully begin a discussion on it. Namely, what to make of geotagged audio samples and recordings. In case you’re not familiar with the term, geotagging is the practice of assigning geographic coordinates to a piece of media like a recording or photo as a form of metadata. In one incarnation, such as on the Freesound project, geotagged samples are layered over Google maps, allowing one to zoom in on any spot on the planet and potentially find samples tagged to specific geographic locations. As numerous startups and one very large corporation (beginning with a ‘G’ and ending with ‘oogle’) have realized, the commercial potential of geotagging is huge. But we hear less about its scientific potential and, of importance here, its aesthetic potential. Continue reading

French-born, Barcelona-based sound designer and artist, Philippe Faujas presents Kiln, a multi-form sound artwork presented as downloadable software, online flash composition and presumably as a physical installation (?), composed with sounds from SoundTransit.nl, where selected cycles of audio interspersed with silence, play back from multiple speakers in a darkened room with concert seating. The sounds are all creative commons licensed. Included are:

Derek Holzer (Binaural Tunnel Study, Binaural rainstorm, Seto song) * Yannick Dauby (Bats-Echolocation) * Planktone (Industry 2, Windmill) * Cedric Peyronnet (Fences And Wind) * Dallas Simpson (Binaural Environmental) * Nick Mariette (Wisdom Tooth Extraction In Binaural) * John Tenny (Desert Wind In The Hall) [via Sonic Surrounds]