Free music
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- Free music can also mean free improvisation: improvised music without any rules, and not in any particular style.
- For information on swapping of commercial music see File sharing, Napster or eMule.
Free music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does not mean that there should be no fee involved. The word free refers to freedom (as in free software), not to price.
Some free music is licensed under licenses that are intended for software (like the GPL) or other written media (the GFDL). But there are also licenses especially for music and other works of art, such as EFF's Open Audio License, LinuxTag's Open Music License, the Free Art license and some of the Creative Commons Licences.
History
Before the advent of copyright law in the early 18th century, all music was free. Copyright laws changed this gradually so much so that in the late 20th century, copying a few words of a musical composition or a few seconds of a sound recording, the two forms of music copyright, could be considered criminal infringement.
In response, the concept of free music was codified in the Free Music Philosophy Ram Samudrala in early 1994. It was based on the idea of Free Software by Richard Stallman and coincided with nascent open art and open information movements. Up to this point, few modern musicians distributed their recordings and compositions in an unrestricted manner, and there was no concrete rationale as to why they did it, or should do it.Template:Citation needed
The Free Music Philosophy used a three pronged approach to voluntarily encourage the spread of unrestricted copying, based on the fact that copies of recordings and compositions could be made and distributed with complete accuracy and ease via the Internet. First, since music by its very nature is organic in its growth, the ethical basis of limiting its distribution using copyright laws was questioned. That is, an existential responsibility was fomented upon music creators who were drawing upon the creations of countless others in an unrestricted manner to create their own. Second, the basis of copyright law, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", had been perverted by the music industry which sought to maximise profit over creativity and placed a huge burden on society (the control of copying) to ensure its profits. Third, as copying became rampant, musicians would have no choice but to move to an economic model that exploited the spread of information to make a living, instead of trying to control it with limited government enforced monopolies.
The Free Music Philosophy was reported on by diverse media outlets including Billboard, Forbes, Levi's Original Music Magazine, The Free Radical, Wired and The New York Times. Along with free software and Linux (a free operating system), copyleft licenses, the explosion of the Web and rise of P2P, the cementing of mp3 as a compression standard for recordings, and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely the reality in the early 21st century. Organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavours of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.
See also
- Copyleft
- Deezer
- Free Culture movement
- File sharing
- List of musical works released in a stem format
- Open music
- Open Music Model
- Podsafe
- Spotify
- We7
- Wolfgang's Vault
