cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/1785739
Hello Everyone! I make chiptunes on trackers which are quite famous for “keygen music” associated with software piracy. My philosophy with the music I make is that all my tracks can be downloaded for free, are copyright free, and most importantly: its source files can be accessed.
The last bit is something I dont see too much of in the music communities (correct me if I am wrong). I would definitely like to see this more popularised perhaps making something akin to “FOSS Music”. Under all of my tracks I put a mediafire link to .xm file. I think this would be incredibly useful to creators as there many times where I hear a song and just love a specific instrument or sample they used and would like to use it in my own music.
Thoughts?
Trent Reznor (NIN) is an open supporter of this. He’s supplied source files and multitrack recordings for many tracks before for people to remix and mess with. Not quite the same but that came to mind anyhow
He is a total creep however, which has marred my enjoyment of any music connected to him.
I’m scared to ask, but… what has he done?
He used the house that a woman was murdered in to record an album and was glorifying the murder by keeping artefacts and naming the house “Le Pig”, in the spirit of something her murderer also wrote about the victim.
He had been claiming not to have known about it and to have been horrified to learn the truth, but given the name that he gave the house and the fact that he took the infamous door with him when he left (where her blood was used by her killer to write the word “Pig”) it’s very hard to believe him.
Very distressing for her family, which is the part that bothers me most.
Many people stayed in the house over the years. It was the Manson murder house and it didn’t horrify him, he named the place after he found out. He did feel differently about it after meeting her sister though, but he did keep the front door when he left. A very macabre piece of history, I don’t really find it out of character though.
https://www.grunge.com/162545/the-most-haunting-last-words-of-criminals/
…I thought the creep was marylin manson, who Trent has come out against before? Trent did some shit when going through his fucked up drug phase but has since apologised fully.
The world would be a very different place without Kevin MacLeod’s music
Fantastic. We need more content and art that is free for creative (re)use. I think this is called Free culture or Libre culture.
I think not only computer code is better when it’s FLOSS, but every form of art greatly benefits from remixing, people taking something and pushing it forward. Using art as a from of debate.
And this works especially well without additional shackles like restrictive copyright or being proprietary.
For anyone wanting to put their art under a free license, take a look at CC0
I’d absolutely love putting any of the absolute abhorrent music or art I make under that license if it didn’t mean a large corporation could come in and use it for their own financial gain.
Then there’s CC BY-NC-SA (non-commercial use only, copyleft)and
Yeah. In my opinion the copyleft aspect is the most important one. It just forces them to share their derivate work under the same license. CC calls that ‘SA’ (Share-Alike). I’m perfectly okay to gift things to the community if I get the same in return. And I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. I don’t care if somebody else can make a few bucks out out of it, as long as they allow me and everyone else the same thing with their stuff. I’m not really a fan of No-Commercial. I think this is too restrictive. Prohibits good projects just because someone is making some form of profit. And ‘commercial’ isn’t well defined.
Just make it CC BY-SA if that’s important to you. Or CC0 if you don’t care or love absolute freedom.
Since this is a post about free and open-source music: non-commercial is not open-source.
This is one of my favourite things about tracker music. It’s obviously a lot more complicated to share the full source files for music that uses a workflow involving paid tools or that is complex to replicate. The de facto openness of the tracker format is something that is unlikely to be seen again, but rendering stems / sharing patches / encouraging sampling are all still valuable.
I’d love to see a healthy foss music scene that encorages building on one another’s work and would definitely participate. Music is way more interesting when we don’t have to fight economic territorialism to make it, as complicated a path as that has become.
It gets a little more difficult with music that is recorded, uses expensive VSTis or where the mixing and mastering is crucial. The raw files aren’t very useful for others.
Tracker music has always been open. Can’t upload a mod file and expect people not to rip the samples.
Sunvox is also very open like that, because everyone has the same modules, it’s only a matter of how they’re used. It also reads xm and mod files. The program comes with lots of user created tracks and people gladly post the files.
I take a similar approach to my compositions and arrangements on Musescore. Anyone can download the sheet music file and edit it, and most everything I do is under Creative Commons attribution/noncommercial. A lot of other Musescore users do this, it allows for a lot more accessible and free sheet music of both modern and classical music.
I think it’s a great idea. Using melodies from other songwriters/composers has been a part of the western music tradition for centuries: Brahms writing his Academic Festival Overture with melodies from a bunch of drinking songs, Tchaikovsky using both the Russian and French national anthems in the 1812 Overture, both Brahms and Rachmaninoff having pieces titled Variations on a Theme by Paganini, basically the entire history of Jazz music, half of the discography of Led Zeppelin, etc. It seems the logical continuation of this tradition in the digital age would be make samples or sound libraries available for other artists to use. Music is the most collaborative form of art after all, and copyright laws only serve to hinder that while enriching a select few – with those few very infrequently being the actual artists.
Quick plug for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who released their album Polygondwanaland for free, including the vinyl masters. So anyone who wanted to could press their own vinyl of the album with their own album art and even create their own music videos. There were a ton of small record labels who made their own prints with super cool designs.
ccmixter.org is a site that does this.
Sounds good, would also be great to have some platform on the fediverse where open source music is shared, so that anyone could make their own spotify-like app to listen to it. And it would need to get some way to donate to the artists
Funkwhale kinda fits the bill. IIRC its federated.
Oh shit I will actually check that out
Why not, sounds nice. But I think it will remain a niche thing. Open source qualities are IMHO not that critically important for art, and I believe neither artists, nor art consumers care that much.
I disagree. Remixing stuff is especially well known in music. Taking parts like a drum beat / break and incorporating it into sth new. Also vocals. True, this isn’t ‘open source’ as of now and needs some skills and technical tools to extract only the voice track for example. But I think art would benefit further if this was easier and available to everyone.
It’s also not niche. Take for example Sigala with the well known take on the Jackson 5’s ABC (or half of modern music) or all the thousands of songs with the Amen break. (But that’s easy to extract)
