I spent two nights sifting through CC-licensed music, and I uploaded two more songs to my radio. But I think I will stop this experiment here.
While there is indeed good, free (as in speech) music out there, I still can’t show you the music I really care about1, at least not legally. I could link to Youtube videos with horrible audio quality (and questionable legality), or I could post a playlist and send you to fetch it’s content at a certain Swedish bay.
But I don’t want this blog to be about music anyway; I just think it’s a great idea to let other people listen to a few samples of the music you like, so they might find something they like, discover new bands or even new genres for themselves. So I’d like to recommend a few songs and have people listen to them without any hassle. It’s what people have done with LPs, CDs, and MCs for decades. It’s the best advertisement any musician and their labels could hope for.
But not on the internet – not in the open. It’s too risky. They (the labels mostly, I guess) could sue me and they might even win. So this music sharing remains in a legal grey area; in the underground.
I’m afraid I can’t offer any insightful conclusion to this little rant. The situation is slowly changing – see Nine Inch Nails – but the big music labels will fight for their (hopefully) lost cause for a long time and do much harm to keep their obsolete business model alive. They not only harm their customers, but probably even more so the artists, who are exploited and chained to a merciless and greedy bureaucracy.
1: “Ode an die Freude”, the Presto from Beethoven’s Ninth, is actually one of my favourite pieces of music, ever. I was lucky to find a free recording of it.
