Meet and Greet: MP3 4U

I also met Paul Jackson from MP3 4U at the Creative Commons party mentioned in the previous post.  Among other topics, we were in agreement that there are ways for artists to get paid that leverage free content and digital distribution of music.

MP3 4U is a directory of free legal MP3 files that feature independent musicians.  The directory or "source music network" is being built by Sources, which include volunteers.  In fact, you too can become a source.  Paul says they'd like to see more hip hop represented in their directory, so this would be a good opportunity for folks who want to alert people to great free music online.

Creative Commons, Copyright and Free Content

So I went to the Creative Commons party in San Francisco on Thursday night. I've already mentioned the Fine Art of Sampling Contests which I found out about during one of the presentations. The final presentation was a Lawrence Lessig special that riffed off recent comments by Bill Gates in which he describes people that want to seriously reform or change copyright (i.e., anything other than getting the system "tuned") as communists. There were a variety of responses to Gates' remarks, including the notion of "creative commonists" with which Lessig played during his presentation.

But Creative Commons is not attempting to do away with copyright and Bill Gates did not identify a particular entity. As their homepage states, "Creative Commons is a nonprofit that offers a flexible copyright for creative work." This approach is managed through multiple forms of licensing from which one can choose elements to mix and match. Such an approach is very different than current practices in the music industry in which copyright is treated as an all or nothing situation. Creative Commons licensing allows the artists, labels or other entities to specify use of their work while still maintaining needed copyright protections.

Nevertheless, Lawrence Lessig speaks as if he wants everything to be free, except for the t-shirt I bought, I guess. You know, when my punk and anarchist friends talk like that, I can see they're living it. When a Stanford Law School professor talks like that, I say, "you're on salary, right?" Nevertheless, Creative Commons is an important initiative and even such figures as Hilary Rosen have come to embrace it.

Unfortunately, because large media corporations tend to take an unsurprisingly rigid stance to anything that would change the status quo as it affects earnings, the major labels have ignored an opportunity to explore a more flexible approach that maintains copyright while opening the doors to the realities of today's information environment. Yet, the "creative commonists" have also missed out on the opportunity to proclaim, not only that Creative Commons licensing frees things up, but it can do so and still generate revenue. So they get musicians who can afford to open up a little or a lot, but they miss out on hungry up and comers who recognize that free won't pay their bills.

For example, Lessig's recent book Free Culture is available as a freely downloadable PDF file and has been since and, possibly, before the book was released in printed form. Yet the book is also ranked at #4,561 for Amazon book sales. Of course, PDFs suck as a way of distributing a book, while MP3 files are an excellent way to distribute music to the currently hot devices that deliver them to the listener. So a one to one comparison between book publishing and album production can't be made.

Nevertheless, there's a lot to consider here that suggests ways for the music industry to transform itself in the face of rapid shifts in technology and user practices. While corporate behemoths will continue to attempt to slow change long enough to control it, the current environment suggests that smaller, nimbler competitors who recognize the depth of current change may be able to get bigger pieces of a pie that no longer looks like the pies of the 1900s.