[cc-community] Introducing Dustcast and a question about my record

Giorgos Cheliotis giorgos at smu.edu.sg
Wed Aug 29 05:45:12 EDT 2007


Dustin thanks for writing one of the most off-beat and somehow sadly
amusing posts on this list about the struggle of a "natural entertainer"
to make a living. It appears that your past efforts at making money from
CD sales haven't been very successful, to say the least. Is it wise to
assume that this time around you can "depend on sales of this CD" for
your income? 

We recently discussed on this list that while this may work for some
artists, others depend more on income from other sources (live
performance, t-shirts, licensing deals, etc). For the latter group the
CD is more of a promotion/advertising vehicle rather than a money-making
product. If you fall in this second category (and my guess is that you
do) it might make sense for you to use one of the most liberal licenses,
e.g., BY, for the CD, to maximize your chances of achieving a wider
distribution, but with the drawback of potentially hurting your sales of
the CD as others will be able to sell and remix the CD as well. Then if
people like your work and it becomes widely known you can find new ways
of making money by capitalizing on your reputation.

Now if you are truly confident that your CD will sell and you have to
depend on these sales to make a living, it might make more sense to
choose a more restrictive license with the NC attribute, the most
restrictive one being BY-NC-ND. If you choose BY-NC-ND your reputation
may still grow from people freely sharing your work, but they can only
do this non-commercially and moreover they cannot remix your work. If
you choose BY-NC, they may have fun making non-commercial remixes, which
may further boost your reputation, if your work lends itself nicely to
remixing.

Finally, if your CD constrains the BY-SA clips you have no choice other
than using BY-SA, at least for those tracks which contain these clips.
I'm not a recording artist, so this is second-hand advice, but I've been
thinking about these issues for some time now, so I took the liberty of
writing this note, hope it's useful.

Giorgos

-----Original Message-----
From: cc-community-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:cc-community-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Dustin
Eyejuice
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 11:56 PM
To: cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [cc-community] Introducing Dustcast and a question about my
record

My name is Dustin Eyejuice, I am a natural entertainer, though I am
currently unemployed. The last job I had was in a factory that makes
dangerous plastic toys that are given away inside plastic eggs in Spain.
Since 1999, I have been largely living on the money left to me by my
dead mother.In 2004, that money ran out, and I have been trying to make
money through a series of business ideas. Firstly, I developed a special
kind of pen for writing secret messages on paper. I thought children
would like these, but the lids were toxic and the ink caused minor burns
on some kinds of skin. Specifically, the skin of children.

My next idea was to take my natural entertainer skill and produce a CD
of my songs. I write songs in my spare time. Many of them are love songs
and often about Plymouth, including 'I met you on the bus to B&Q' and
'Your hair reminds me of Derry's Cross'. Sadly, I was given bad advice
about this CD, and spent my remaining money getting thousands of copies
pressed. To date, I have sold less than three of them, and have recently
taken to fashioning them into novelty ashtrays and selling them in my
local pub, Hammers, on Sebastian Avenue, in Plymouth.

In 2005, I became involved with a podcast, and was promised money that
never came. These days, I do a little bit of casual, untaxed bar work in
Hammers, for which I am not paid, due to a prior incident with the
landlord's nephew's cat, and I also put on a variety evening once a
week, called 'An Evening with Dustin Eyejuice' - my initial announcement
of this is available, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license from my website in both audio and text form.

I spend my spare time looking for ways to make money, making freephone
calls from phone boxes and avoiding future altercations with cats.

I have started doing a podcast, from my website.
http://eyejuice.wordpress.com/ - I have licensed this under CC-BY-SA
3.0, so I can take clips from 'Where are the Joneses' and make them say
things.

I have recorded a CD, of my greatist hits. Which license would be a good
one to use for this? Right now, I depend on sales of this CD for my
income.

- Dustin
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