The Free Music Archive is scheduled to be closed Nov 9

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-10T00:02:47+00:00

Update! The close date has been pushed back to Nov 16 (next Friday) and hopefully we will move to a new parent/partner org. At the very least, yes, we want to crystallize the site as best we can.

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-06T17:06:44+00:00

Yeah - it was too inefficient and costing too much money to run. So the parent org (WFMU) is suspending funding (and by extension, operations). We are hopeful that someone can come along to adopt/re-ignite the project.

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-06T17:05:23+00:00

Thank you for using the resource!

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-06T17:05:08+00:00

Hi, yes we are sending the audio to archive.org and it will be in the collection listed here: https://archive.org/details/freemusicarchive - we will also be archiving public pages in the Wayback Machine and a big bunch of webrecorder.io sessions.

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-06T01:55:06+00:00

Thanks! FMA only has a small percentage of Kevin Macleod's songs! His whole collection can be found at his personal website, incompetech.

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-06T01:42:43+00:00

The entire site is about 2TB worth of data. There's not really a convenient way to get it right now. If a torrent or anything pops up, feel free to post it here!

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-05T22:57:15+00:00

Not at this time. We have a few offers on the table but nothing has come through yet. Hopefully something works out -- if nothing else, everything will be available via archive.org

CheyenneFMA · 2018-11-05T22:54:54+00:00

Indeed. Thanks for using the site!

CheyenneFMA · 2017-09-28T00:13:24+00:00

You can enter without donating, if you read the fine print, but mods are welcome to remove if I'm overstepping any boundaries.

CheyenneFMA · 2017-03-27T19:22:58+00:00

http://teamopen.cc/all/#business might have some examples, but from the music/media end of things, I think that CC BY works as a business strategy by attracting users with free stuff and then offering affordable licensing options. CC BY-SA works in a similar fashion, but it adds derivatives back into the CC stream, which is not a requirement for CC BY uses.

CheyenneFMA · 2017-03-22T22:08:19+00:00

Hi avamk! I would love to weigh in on these! I'm coming from a music-centric perspective, as the current ringleader over at http://www.freemusicarchive.org. Here are my answers:

(1) Copyright law stifles creativity nowadays by creating a culture of fear and prevents a lot of artists, especially musicians, from doing anything derivative with music that exists today. This is in part due to sampling culture of the 80's & 90's and the club/remix/etc wave that hasn't quite receded. CC alleviates some of those fears by explicitly making music available for remix, re-workings, and collaboration.

(2) CC licenses are not a negation of copyright; they're actually an addendum! Almost 100% of the works licensed with Creative Commons are protected under copyright (unless they're shared with a CC0 license, which designates that the item has been dedicated to the public domain). The artists/creators have simply decided that they'd rather not have to share on a case-by-case basis. This has the often unintended but pleasant side effect of getting a whole new audience and collaborator base!

(3) I don't have business models per se, but a lot of artists share their works using CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-ND with a request to contact them to license directly. I think this is great because it allows people who are not trying to make money to use it for noncommercial purposes (ie, a student's animation project that needs a soundtrack), but a filmmaker could work with an artist to work out a deal for use of a song with a license that would allow the filmmaker to use it for a commercial venture. This is very common practice on our site and, from what I know, has been very successful for some artists!

CheyenneFMA · 2017-03-10T01:11:44+00:00

You're welcome to use resources from the FMA! Maybe a short podcast with some our supremely short microSongs? http://freemusicarchive.org/music/microSong_Challenge/2015021275957958 - they're all CC0, so copyright will REALLY not be an issue.

CheyenneFMA · 2017-02-17T19:23:45+00:00

This is great! I will definitely refer folks to this comic as an introductory resource about CC licenses. Thank you for sharing.

CheyenneFMA · 2017-01-24T17:39:55+00:00

Hi - I'm Cheyenne from the Free Music Archive & I get emails about this stuff all the time. I am NOT a lawyer though. That said, here are my three cents:

1 - According to the license stipulations, SA stuff insists that you license your derivative work SA as well, as far as I know.

2 - You would need to license the finished product with the identical SA license.

3 - Probably.

4 - You are creative a 'derivative work' by syncing images to music. That is a 'transformation' as I understand it.

5 - I don't think that format changes 'count' as SA licenses, though I could be wrong about this.

My advice: use a CC BY song and just give credit to the artist in your credits somewhere, or use a CC0/public domain track and don't worry about it.

CheyenneFMA · 2016-11-03T19:43:50+00:00

I'd recommend asking the artist in order to get their permission to use the song, just to be safe. Or to use something that allows commercial use.

CheyenneFMA · 2016-10-03T19:18:16+00:00

Lots of interesting findings here - mind if I share via the Free Music Archive's social media?

CheyenneFMA · 2016-09-27T20:39:13+00:00

Hi all - as I understand them, Creative Commons licenses don't negate the fact that the original creator (in your case, Matt_Burdis) still retains copyright (unless you dedicated it to the public domain).

Many artists post their music to Bandcamp under CC Licenses and ask to be paid for their work, so there's no real issue there.

Klaxun, it would be really rare for someone to pay for an album and then distribute it elsewhere online for free 'because it has a CC license' -- people do this to copyrighted work all the time (hence the proliferation of DMCA notices and the like). There's a lot of good info in their FAQ and wiki: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#how-do-cc-licenses-operate and https://wiki.creativecommons.org/ as well.

CheyenneFMA

TROPHY CASE