Open Music - JoCo and NIN
I tend to talk a lot about Open Access science because it’s the field I work in and the place I feel like I personally can make the most difference. To be fair, however, I really want *everything* to be open.
That’s why I also like the sort of simmering groundswell of musical artists taking their work into more liberal copyright regimes. The ones who “get it” realize that they can’t fight their fans tooth and nail and still get those same fans to spend money on their work. Radiohead got a lot of press for releasing “In Rainbows” as a digital download with an opt-in price, but unfortunately it seems like this may have been more of a marketing maneuver than a real embrace of copyright freedom.
I discovered Jonathan Coulton some time back, sort of because his name kept popping up around other things that I liked. Something about his DIY nature - running his own website, writing and recording the music in his apartment - really make him a likable guy. It helps that his music is catchy and fun. He puts all of his songs up for sale on his website (as well as a few other places around the web, but buy from him and pass along all the profits why don’t you) as 192 kbps MP3s (oh and he has FLAC now as well) with no DRM at all.
Of course I have heard about Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) and his bile towards the traditional labels. I also knew that they released their latest album, Ghosts, as a $5 download without DRM under a Creative Commons license. What I hadn’t done until today was actually listen to it. I remembered the NIN from my high school days and assumed that it would be the same sort of stuff. I was wrong. Check some of this stuff out:
It’s sort of ambient instrumental, but with a good mix of sounds and beats that keeps it from getting dull. I’m really loving what I’ve heard so far, and I’ll be buying this as soon as I’m sitting in front of my media machine.
Comment time (please, so far there are a whopping zero comments here): What is your favorite source of DRM free music? Amazon MP3 store? eMusic? Direct from artists? Other (indie) websites?
March 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am
[...] see, I recognized it, because I had just bought the album - it was off of the NIN Ghosts set that I blogged about last week. Now, I’m not 100% familiar with how these things work, but I do know that the album is [...]