[cc-community] Rcrd Lbl to offer CC and Free as in Beer Music

Christopher Budnick cbudnick at gmail.com
Sat Nov 17 22:10:34 EST 2007


On Nov 17, 2007 9:02 PM, Greg London <email at greglondon.com> wrote:
> At that point, it seems that music is not nearly
> as fungible as software. or wikipedia. The creative
> process of writing a new song can take months.
> Occaisions when it takes weeks is considered to
> be a very impressively short period of time.
> And you need thousands of songs to be created.

There are a few problems I see with this:

1) This sort of copyleft has only come recently to music and
literature and only recently have we started to see what can be done
with this. We've seen remixes created in the past using leaked source
material (pre-mixdown instrumental channels when recorded in a studio)
and now that's actually being sanctioned, with a capella tracks being
released under liberal licenses and artists no longer having to
isolate drum breaks or play with the EQ.

2) There are huge projects that already exist like this, WFMU's Free
Music Archive, or OLPC/FC's Free Music Project. Part of the OLPC
project, that I am working on at least, is to break existing MP3s down
into their source tracks and provide these instruments and
instrumentals to children to use through TamTam to create new music of
their own.

3) Certainly music is 'fungible' in terms of appropriation of existing
musical ideas or progressions. This is true for most creation and art,
but the recycling of existing recorded samples, covers, tributes,
Jamaican usage of riddims, and the recent usage of micro-sampling by
artists such as Girl Talk all are somewhat unique to music and thrive
under progressive copyright and miraculously still exist under ARR
through the tendencies of artists to create art because of or despite
a restrictive environment.

4) To the extent of which music and other creative expressions form
culture they also invoke systems of iconography and shared cultural
signs that we express ourselves through. The creation of a single song
over the course of a day might be limited by a single creator's output
but the ability to reuse that expression to form ideas and communicate
with others is outside of him and ourselves. The codes and signs we
use are increasingly controlled and locked away from us, and this is,
I think, the greatest source of the 'fungible,' our ability to invoke
and make malleable those signs.

Fundamentally it's not so much about the speed of which a single or
group of cultural artifacts can be created, in fact it rarely is. It's
about the variety and richness of the culture we'll be able to create
and exist within and through.

best
christopher


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