On Wed March 15 2006 13:30, Juhana Sadeharju wrote: > We could have an organized community where volunteer musicians > make music similar to the top commercial songs. When the idea > works, one may get top pop music for free. I don't mean to be mean, but this idea makes me throw up a little. You may have noticed that a lot of free software designed to copycat popular proprietary software has been paid for by corporations (the most obvious example being Openoffice, but also Mozilla during its time as an AOL property, Linspire nee Lindows, and Xgl at Novell.) I think the same is true of commercial music; corporations pay for copycat songs, and the performers and producers do it for a paycheck, not to scratch their own artistic itch as producers of free music do. The only function I could see this serving would be "Look how close to X my music is without infringing upon it.... hire me and I'll do more of it for you." That, and I don't think most free musicians have bimbos and Autotune at their disposal, both necessary for the creation of generic soundalike pop music. (I would mention hip-hop too, but that's way too personality-oriented to try to copycat.) Finally, if your scheme were to succeed, it would only be competition to unsigned "house musicians", not pop stars or the recording industry, because companies that needed pop music for use in their TV shows or commercials would just use the CC-licensed stuff rather than keep paying the house musicians. > We need this kind of alternative way of making free music. > For example, the recent free music CD announced here at LAU > simply sucks. I don't know why. While I haven't heard anything on the free music CD, I don't really think you'll make a lot of headway by telling people their music sucks. I'm just saying. Rob
