Common music : intro
Or where I start searching the Internet for good free music : things that are copyleft, or public domain, or creative commons, or watherver.
Why would I do that? I work for a radio station called campus and for a project called radioswap. The first is a non-commercial, independent radio station (you should listen to it, it’s rather good ^_-), the second is an exchange platform for, again, non-commercial radio stations.
Some months ago, I was at a meeting organised by the crid (centre de recherche informatique et droit). Around the table, lawyers, university people, radio people and people from the music industry : two from a society collecting royalties for authors and composers, one from a society representing the record producers (major companies as well as a good deal of the independents). And these were very fast to say that it was absolutely impossible to make radio without using their “catalogue” or “repertoire” (as they see it, it is clear they represent the owners of at least 90% of what’s broadcast on any radio, and it would be impossible for things to be different).
Around the same time, the amount of money the radio stations have to pay for copyright went through the roof, for various belgian reasons (won’t go into details here).
And so, here I am, trying to see if it would be possible, or even interesting, to make radio with only content that is free to use with a non-commercial purpose.
The answer seems to be yes. I started looking yesterday, already found loads of stuff. I will post on a regular basis about the results.