Posts Tagged ‘creative commons’

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Music, tech and culture roundup

August 31, 2009

long tail graphic

After a summer hiatus, zed equals zee is getting back on a regular posting schedule. But you probably still want to sign up for the RSS feed.

Catching up on some music, tech and culture from around the web and around the world.

Owen Kelly designed the graphic, above, to help bands visualize their fanbase, from casual fans to the long tail of committed fans. Click for a larger version, and read more about it here.

In case you haven’t been following The Flamings Lips, who played in Boston last night, they have an interesting model for music distribution: when you bought your ticket, you received immediate access to three tracks from their new album. This month, you received access to three B-sides. And finally, after the show, you receive access to an audio download of the concert. All nice and legit, with the cost of the music factored into your ticket.

Nina Paley, creator of Sita Sings the Blues, collaborated with QuestionCopyright.org to come up with the Creator-Endorsed Mark. It complements Creative Commons licensing, in that it allows distributors of CC-licensed work to indicate that they are sharing profits with the creator. Paley argues that, when fans connect with a creative work, they want to give back to the artist and it should be clear when they are doing so. Read a PBS MediaShift article about it here, and you can download the marks here.

Finally, you’ve probably heard that Apple is planning a proprietary album format, code-named Cocktail, which bundles together an album’s worth of music with assorted extras like art, movies, and lyrics, all wrapped up in a shiny DRM’ed wrapper. Since music lovers have made it clear that they aren’t interested in buying albums when they can buy songs they want à la carte, it’s not clear to me why they’d be interested in buying Cocktail packages – Apple’s sweetening the pot, but rather missing the point. But straying a little bit outside the purview of this blog, it does make me wonder about the future of DVD extras – when we are downloading movies instead of buying DVDs, what will become of all the additional goodies that filmmakers provide? Will they just go on a website to help promote the download? Premium content? What do you think about bundling extras with downloadable content?

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Neophile: The Craft Economy

March 26, 2009

craft-econ-s_on_your_side

I first came across The Craft Economy last year, through a post at Boing Boing. They attracted attention by stapling their CDs to telephone poles in Kensington Market in Toronto, their hometown (and mine). The CDs, released under a Creative Commons license, were part of a protest against Bill C-61, the Canadian analog to the justly-maligned Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Somewhat more to the point, however, I really enjoy their music – it kind of reminds me of a poppier, female-fronted Alkaline Trio. Their new EP, Is On Your Side,  came out in the fall, and it’s terrific (and did very well on Canadian college radio). I especially enjoyed the little CanCon lyrical joke embedded into the driving rhythms of “The Tonic” – the lines “Bye-bye mon cowboy/bye-bye mon rodeo,” which sounded really familiar. A few seconds of Googling reminded me that they were from Quebec pop star Mitsou’s first hit in 1988.

And if you’re interested, The Craft Economy makes their tracks available for remix, as part of its CC-license.

MP3: The Craft Economy – The Tonic [buy]

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Read: The Indie Band Survival Guide

October 23, 2008

I’m not a musician. I’m just a fan. So I’m kind of amazed (and grateful) that the bands I like are willing to put up with smelly vans, sleeping in a different place every night, and what I’m sure is pretty marginal pay to keep making new music and coming out to entertain me. I’m acutely aware that it wouldn’t take much for most of them to pack it in, go get a day job, and maybe play gigs with their friends in their hometowns occasionally. I therefore have a strong vested interest in seeing the bands I like succeed, at least to the point where putting on the green apron doesn’t seem like a better alternative. So listen up, new bands – please go read Beatnik Turtle’s Indie Music Survival Guide.

Beatnik Turtle, themselves an independent band, have collated everything they’ve learned into this guide, which is available either as a PDF [PDF link, duh] or as a paperback – something you can read during those quiet stretches in the tour van. The guide is a pretty enlightening read even – maybe especially – for a non-musician. It starts by busting the myth of ‘getting a record contract, getting heard on the radio, and being a rock star,’ and then goes into the tools a band can use for a DIY approach. Topics include promotion, putting on shows, filesharing, the basics of recording an album, and a nice primer on copyright and alternatives (like Creative Commons licenses) for independent bands. Speaking of which, for their own music and other work, they decided to improve on Creative Commons licensing by starting with Sampling, Attribution and Noncommercial and adding a proviso: “Don’t make it suck.”

Read more about the Indie Music Survival Guide and join the online forums here, or purchase a dead-tree edition here.

MP3 link: Beatnik Turtle – Mason Rocket (Spy Extraordinaire) [more song info]

[via Boing Boing]

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