Commercial Production Music vs. Creative Commons

A more recent development in the world of commercial music “music you can use” is Creative Commons.

From what we’ve seen, the Creative Commons has its greatest impact in the world of “mashups”… where various elements are creatively combined for artistic or entertainment purposes. A perfect example would be a YouTube video featuring certain kinds of existing footage (or possibly footage introduced for the first time in this work) and merged with a preexisting song and sound effects found elsewhere. Creative Commons attempts to define “fair use” for such an effort, which is usually not based around the idea of profit.

Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001 by a group of intellectual property experts, lawyers and web publishers. Creative Commons licenses cover art, music, and writing… but it is not designed for software. CC is an organization founded to help authors and creators who are interested in sharing their work avoid the very restrictive rules of copyright, and their subsequent chilling effect on users. The licenses available through CC allow authors and creators to attach a recognizable legal document to their work, especially but not exclusively web work, that allows users to make broad categories of use of that work without further permission. Creative Commons intends to provide tools that solve both problems: a set of free public licenses strong enough to withstand a court’s scrutiny and simple enough for non-lawyers to use, but yet sophisticated enough to be identified by various Web applications.

Creative Commons helps copyright holders release their works via terms that are more generous than default copyrights. It also helps creators understand the terms under which their work may be used… and assign rights under those terms. CC is a not-for-profit organization that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons seems poorly understood to date, but people do appear to be starting to dip their toes in the water at this point.

Creative Commons is perhaps the most impressive embodiment of the ideas and potential behind RDF and related technologies. The vocabulary is anchored in authority developed by a team of lawyers — and lawyers, of course, are the profession most associated with nailing down semantics. Creative Commons has created a solution, a legal licensing toolkit, in much the same manner that open-source software licenses gave developers tools to share their code. CC is helping to instigate cultural change: empowering rights holders with the knowledge and tools to decide under what terms they wish third parties to use their creations, while permitting users easy and user-friendly means to use content lawfully without the necessity of requesting permission. The release of the CC licences has inspired a global revolution, supported by a sub-culture with its own identity, ideology, activities and membership and the spawning of other model licences developed with a similar philosophy, such as Science Commons, Patent Commons and Creative Archive.

Creative Commons provides a valuable resource for the modern “cut and paste” culture that has been neglected by traditional copyright law. The need for content management tools that are both easy to use and free, and material that can be legally utilized by private individuals for creative purposes without the need to obtain additional permissions, will only increase as user-generated content grows in importance and popularity.

Creative Commons licenses only apply to copyrightable works. There may be many other legal issues that arise in relation to copyrighted materials that Creative Commons licenses do not cover and that database providers need to consider. CC requires support to help enable a participatory culture – a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us all. Creative Commons intends to be a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Creative Commons doesn’t set out to create a social movement but rather to give artists choice and a stable of great ready-made licenses. They’ve succeeded in that. Creative Commons representatives have stated that the trademark restrictions are not part of the license. In a graphical Web browser, the text for the trademark restrictions are visually distinct from the license text.

Even with a somewhat slow start, Creative Commons has demonstrable value and some clear applications to the field of production music.

Music Licensing: Indie Musicians vs. Commercial Production Music

In much the same way as buyout music libraries have functioned to provide easily-accessible solutions to music synchronization for video, telephony, web, etc…the emergence of the independent musician has begun to change the way commercial music use “gets done”. The traditional record labels and the music industry have begun to become completely unhinged…their power is diminishing (both for good and for bad), and this, combined with the accessibility of the internet and the ongoing explosion in technology (especially MP3 technology) has made music, even good music, ubiquitous.

Because indie musicians control their own creations (freeing those creations from the traditional publishing agreements), commercial enterprises of various types have begun to look at how this music can be incorporated in various ways. These days, you’re as likely as not to hear the intro for a tune from a local singer-songwriter playing as “bumper music” on the Martha Stewart show as you are a song from a major pop artist. Why? Because the rights to that song can be acquired much more cheaply….and money is a factor for everyone, isn’t it? It certainly is in a competitive field like media production!

This is why we’ve observed more and more unknown artists like Dirty Vegas and Hem seeing their music utilized by major advertising entities such as Volkswagen, Liberty Mutual, Apple Computers, etc. It’s much cheaper for Apple to approach someone an indie artist than it is for them to use a song by U2…which they still might do, of course, if they are promoting a U2-branded iPod. Otherwise, however, they’re more likely to dip into the indie world.

An Emerging Market

There are even companies that do nothing but plug these songs to exactly these kinds of producers, and for some indie musicians, it’s become a nice secondary (or “first-ondary”) source of income. Pump Audio is one example, but there are many others, including single individuals who are well-connected in both the worlds of music and production.

So, commercial music, in the form of production music libraries…(whether needledrop or royalty-free music/buyout music) now has some competition…even among those who are choosing to obey the law. These days, producers of various types of media are directly connecting with recording artists through their web sites, seeking to license their music for various purposes. Many artists are including music licensing rates on their sites.

Rates for such uses are usually affected by a variety of factors including:

• for-profit vs not-for-profit
• length of use
• what region or size of audience will be affected
• access to a single song, entire album, the artist’s body of work

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