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cc-commonerletter - [cc-commonerletter] Commoner Letter #3: Jonathon Coulton

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Subject: A series of letters written by prominent members of the CC community during our annual fundraising campaign.

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  • From: "Melissa Reeder" <melissa AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-commonerletter AT lists.ibiblio.org, "CC Board" <cc-board AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [cc-commonerletter] Commoner Letter #3: Jonathon Coulton
  • Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:51:56 -0800

To our community - for our next commoner letter we are featuring an
artist who has really proven that the CC model works for musicians.
Jonathan Coulton has made a career out of sharing his music with his
fans, not just aurally, but digitally and meaningfully through the
prolific use of our licenses. We've also worked with Jonathan this
year to offer an exciting new CC item available here:
http://support.creativecommons.org/join
-- a custom USB jump drive stocked with his music and source tracks.
Read on for his heartfelt commoner letter and for more information
about our new jump drives.

Please help us spread the word about this exciting new offer! Feel
free to either link to the announcement blog post
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/10668 and/or Digg It!
http://digg.com/music/Unreleased_Jonathan_Coulton_on_Creative_Commons_Jump_Drives

-----------------------------------------------------------

Dear Creative Commoner:

I first learned about Creative Commons when I heard Lawrence Lessig
speak at a conference in 2004. I had been invited there to sing a
silly song about the future, revenge, and robot armies to an audience
of futurists and super scientists. It was a little intimidating - I
was not even Internet Famous then. I was still working at my day job,
trying to figure out how a career software guy in his mid 30s could
ever find a way to make a living writing songs. Lessig gave his
standard presentation (to this day, still the most delicious
Powerpoint kung fu I have ever seen) explaining the history of
copyright and the goals of Creative Commons. As we all filed out for
lunch, I remember feeling like my head was on fire, it was just the
most exciting idea I had ever heard.

In those days one of the things that was keeping me from doing music
full time was my lack of a coherent plan: I make music, something
happens, I make money, that was about as far as I could think it
through. Creative Commons filled in a lot of the gaps for me. I knew
about the internet of course, I was aware of the rise of remix
culture, file sharing, and fan-created content. But there was
something so compelling about the Creative Commons license, the idea
that you could attach it to a piece of art you had made and declare
your intentions - please, share my music, put it in a remix, make it
into a music video. I was thrilled and emboldened by the idea that I
could give my songs legs, so that they could walk around the world and
find their way into places I would never dream of sending them. I
immediately started licensing my songs with CC, and a year later I
quit my job to create music full time.

It's hard to overstate the degree to which CC has contributed to my
career as a musician. In 2005 I started Thing a Week, a project in
which I recorded a new song every week and released it for free on my
website and in a podcast feed, licensing everything with Creative
Commons. Over the course of that year, my growing audience started to
feed back to me things they had created based on my music: videos,
artwork, remixes, card games, coloring books. I long ago lost track of
this torrent of fan-made stuff, and of course I'll never know how many
people simply shared my music with friends, but there's no question in
my mind that Creative Commons is a big part of why I'm now able to
make a living this way. Indeed, it's where much of my audience comes
from - there are some fan-made music videos on YouTube that have been
viewed millions of times. That's an enormous amount of exposure to new
potential fans, and it costs me exactly zero dollars.

When you're an artist, it's a wonderful thing to hear from a fan who
likes what you do. But it's even more thrilling to see that someone
was moved enough to make something brand new based on it - that your
creative work has inspired someone to do more creative work, that your
little song had a child and that child was a YouTube video that a
million people watched. A Creative Commons license is like a joy
multiplier. The art you create adds to the world whenever someone
appreciates it, but you also get karma credit for every new piece of
art it inspires. And around and around. This is my favorite thing
about Creative Commons: the act of creation becomes not the end, but
the beginning of a creative process that links complete strangers
together in collaboration. To me it's a deeply satisfying and
beautiful vision of what art and culture can be.

This is why I've chosen to release a greatest hits album of my
Thing-A-Week songs to help support Creative Commons' 2008 campaign.
We've teamed up to combine not only the unreleased "JoCo Looks Back"
album, but all of the unmixed audio tracks for all of the 20 songs on
a custom CC green 1gb jump drive. The drives, whose entire contents
are licensed under CC's BY-NC-SA license, will be available
exclusively through Creative Commons' support site until December
31st, and you can get one today when you donate $50 and above.

=======

We rely on our supporters to continue our work enabling
stories like those listed above. Check it out --

Donate:
http://support.creativecommons.org/join

CC Store:
http://support.creativecommons.org/store

Events:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Events

ccNewsletter:
http://creativecommons.org/about/newsletter

Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the
generous support of organizations including the Center for the
Public Domain, the Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation,
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of
the public.

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  • [cc-commonerletter] Commoner Letter #3: Jonathon Coulton, Melissa Reeder, 11/17/2008

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