Some Noise

I have become increasingly intrigued with the website opsound.com. They call the bringing together of sounds and music a “sound pool”. I was curious to see how one uploaded a song to the website so I did just that. The site declares that, “All material for the sound pool will be released under a Creative Commons license (the "Attribution-ShareAlike license"), a copyleft license in the spirit of open source software license which allows for all kinds of copying, remixing, use, and reuse while retaining an attribution to the original artist.” I clicked on the link and it lead me to another site entitled “Creative Commons”. It basically said that by the terms I’m agreeing to, I’m free to share and remix as long as everyone on the site is cool with it. Fair enough. I then thought it prudent to peruse the Creative Commons website, but found to my dismay that in order to get to the good content I had to donate 25 bucks, which every college student may agree it might as well be 1000. Sigh. Anyway, back to the story about uploading my music to this sound pool. I had to provide a name for the band, an email address, a song title, and a URL. This gave me a little frustration; because I was under the influence I could upload my song directly from my computer. Ah well. Lucky for me I have a musician’s page on MySpace which has been dormant for at least 9 months. Despite my twinge on anger I entered my MySpace URL and song name into the required fields and voila, one of my songs is now available to a number of artists to listen to and remix. If anyone is curious to see if this experiment worked you may go to the website and search the band name IJP, that’ll be me.

As a little bit of a post script to this blog I attempted to download Amplive’s remixes of Radiohead’s In Rainbows (after watching that film on copyright in class), and to my dismay every time I tried to do so I got an error message. It is my belief that corporate lawyers finally got the best of him and he was forced to take it off the internet. I hope this wasn’t Radiohead’s doing. If anyone has information on this please respond.