catapult magazine

I found this the other day and it is pretty cool. It’s a collection of live music (from artists who permit non-commercial bootlegs of their shows), sort of an audio version of the open-source movement.

http://www.archive.org/audio

[We are] a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution.

It looks like there may be more stuff on archive.org, but I haven’t explored it yet.

i just followed a few links from the above site in relation to the idea of “open source music” and ended up on http://www.creativecommons.org. This is great! It asks you a few questions about how you want people to be able to access and use your works and writes up a license.

For instance you can distribute songs on your website and allow people to use them non-commercially as long as they credit you and allow others to use their work in the same way. It looks like it is meant for writing, photography, visual art, music, films, educators…

“…some rights reserved.”

one more thing…the creative commons licenses are expressed in three ways:

1. User-friendly text
2. Lawyer speak
3. Machine code

so that people can understand it, you’re covered legally, and search-engines can deliver more accurate searches.