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jason on 02/06/2012 at 06:00PM
My Bubba & Mi: String Band & Jingle Factory

My Bubba & Mi is the duo of Gudbjörg Tomasdottir and My Larsdotter. Originally from Iceland and Sweden, they are now based in Copenhagen. They've been playing music together since the late oughts, but theirs is a timeless sound: two acoustic stringed instruments (guitar, banjo, bass) + two sweet harmonized vocals. Occasionally sprinkled with organ, harmonica, a scraped washboard or train rumble:
"Steamengeene" is a track off of How It’s Done In Italy, a Creative Commons full-length from Utrecht's great label/netlabel Beep! Beep! Back Up The Truck. Last year, they followed it up with two EPs: BOB (in tribute to Bob Dylan?) and Wild & You, which are also available on very vinyl looking CDs from Beep Beep.
My Bubba & Mi recently founded the Hello Jingle Factory. They exhibited the project at the Reykjavik Art Museum, but it's not just art -- they've got a real jingles and an application form if you'd like to put your own message to song. Here's the entertaining infomercial:
jason on 01/30/2012 at 02:30PM
Tracks to Sync: Twelve for 2012

Tracks to Sync is series of mixes curated with the online video producer in mind. Along with a few new faces, this playlist features updates from artists who'll already be familar to FMA regulars. License and artist info below, and if you're new to the Creative Commons licenses that facilitate online sharing, we've gathered links to great resources in our Music for Video portal.
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You might recognize that Windom Earle track if you're one of the 5 million people who watched Fight for the Future's "PIPA/SOPA Break the Internet" video. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA] We discovered Immortal Beats on the Frostwire Creative Commons mixtape. [Creative Commons BY-SA] Grass Hop is the latest release by Broke For Free aka Tom Cascino from Santa Cruz CA. His "Something Elated," as featured in Sept's Tracks to Sync, went on to top the charts at FMA and has been featured in countless videos throughout the web including this really cool timelapse of a 134 hour journey through Norway's "Hurtigruten". [Creative Commons BY-NC] Bethlehem PA's Jared C. Balogh is a Classwar Karaoke participant who joined forces with Lee Rosevere's Happy Puppy Records for the new album Rhythms of Life. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA] Lloyd Rodgers is a contemporary experimental composer who makes his works dating back to the 1970s available through his website with "No Copyright / No Rights Reserved." This recording of his Cartesian Reunion Memorial Orchestra was originally composed to accompany a ballet. |
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The Freak Fandango Orchestra is a multi-ethnic band from Barcelona who recently performed at Barbés Brooklyn and release music under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Oddio Overplay first introduced the FMA to Lee Rosevere, a Canadian composer who approaches music informed by his professional broadcast experience. His latest album was imagined as a soundtrack to Isaac Asimov's science fiction stories (link). [CC BY-NC-SA]
Ending Satellites from Bayonne France mix music with photography in a journey between pictures and melodies. Be sure to get the free deluxe version of their new album for its accompanying artworks! [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]
The OO-Ray took part in disquiet's Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards in which artists composed music to accompany each other's insagram photos, using sonic and visual filters to explore the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]
junior85 aka Tony Higgins has struck up a very cool collaboration with filmmaker Danny Cooke, which began here at the FMA and we wrote about last year. Danny commissioned a new soundtrack for his latest film about letterpress and movable type. Junior85's soundtrack to Upside Down, Left To Right - A Letterpress Film is now available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license to inspire new works.
Blear Moon also inspired a Danny Cooke film, as featured in April's Tracks to Sync. Now based in Prague, the Russia-born artist returns with another fantastic ambient release, Town of Two Houses. [Creative Commons BY-NC-SA]
Chris Zabriskie recently removed the NonCommercial clause from his work in favor of Attribution-only, and wrote an article, "Why I Went CC-BY," explaining his reasoning. His latest release, Undercover Vampire Policeman, is beautifully minimal and darkly cinematic, with excellent song titles to boot. [CC-BY]
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Most of these artists provide contact info if you'd like to reach out for more permissions than the CC license grants -- they'll be happy to hear from you, and it can lead to cool collaborations like this one between Tony Higgins and Danny Cooke:
jason on 10/28/2011 at 09:30AM
PIPA Will Break The Internet: Creative Commons Video w/ Music From FMA
This new video by Fight for the Future and Kirby Ferguson (Everything is a Remix) is well worth checking out.
It's a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA video that incorporates awesome music by artists who share their work under video-safe licenses via the FMA (credits at the end).
The video describes a new bill that is moving quickly through congress under the misleading name "Protect Intellectual Property Act" as a disingenuous threat to the basic structure of the web:
"The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites-- they just have to convince a judge that the site is 'dedicated to copyright infringement.' The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior."
PIPA would give the government and corporations the ability to censor the net in the name of protecting "creativity," which when you look at the details seems counterintuitive. If you're an artist who want to tell congress that you actually feel empowered by the Internet, and threatened rather by this bill, Fight for the Future drafted a letter to congress from artists here, while a more general letter can be found here.
jason on 09/21/2011 at 04:00PM
Vimeo connects video producers with video-safe Creative Commons music thru FMA API
Free Music Archive artists who wish to participate in the open sharing of their works now have a direct line to video producers through Vimeo. The classy video-hosting site is utilizing the Free Music Archive's API to index the video-safe portion of our library (i.e. Creative Commons tracks that don't have the "NoDerivatives" clause) as the free option in their "Music Store".
Vimeo is the go-to resource for creative independent video producers, and its community exists specifically to support noncommercial artists, so this is an exciting moment that will help those of us who share our music under these licenses to expand our reach.
From Vimeo's announcement:
As many of you know, finding music for your videos can be somewhat... well, painful. Licensing music on your own can be confusing and finding good free music can take forever. Many of us here at Vimeo are video creators or filmmakers as well and we experience these frustrations on a regular basis. So, we decided to do something about it.
The majority of FMA music is pre-cleared for noncommercial use only, so it might sound strange for free music to be included in something called a "Music Store" alongside paid music from Audiosocket. But for many artists, free noncommercial sharing is part of a broader promotional strategy, and leads to lucrative commercial opportunities. We always love to hear from FMA artists about the cool collaborations that result when video producers discover their music on the FMA -- viral videos that reach 2 million views, commissioned scores for new documentary films, the mobile app soundtracks -- so please chime in if you have a story to tell.
Vimeo introduced Creative Commons licensing for video last summer, so we've already seen some inspiring video projects powered by CC music from the FMA educational projects, travelogues, time lapses, recipe-sharing, and science videos to the immensely popular cute animal videos. We look forward to the works that this bridge between the CC Music Community and the CC Video Community will inspire.
It sounds like the Music Store is going to continue to evolve, so if you have feedback you can leave a comment here.
jason on 09/21/2011 at 09:30AM
Tracks to Sync, Sept 2011
Here's the latest volume of the FMA's Tracks to Sync series of Creative Commons music mixes curated with the online video producer in mind! The FMA hosts music that wants to be shared under a range of licenses, and while some cannot be used in a video without permission from the artist because they have the "NoDerivatives" clause, the tracks in this mix can on terms that range from Attribution-only (CC BY) to Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA). If you're new to the site, you can read more in our FAQ and at Creative Commons' website.
Most of the artists in this mix offer more tracks on the FMA or beyond, so if you like what you hear you can dig deeper. You can also reach out to most artists directly via their homepage or FMA profile if you would like to license their music beyond the scope of the CC license, and whenever you use an artist's music we recommend sending them a link to the work they helped inspire by leaving a comment — they'll be happy to hear from you!
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Fanas comes to the FMA from Romania's Local Records, with a distinct electronic sound of contemporary Bucharest (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) Broke For Free is the beatmaking alias of Santa Cruz CA's Tom Casino, and "Something Elated" has been climbing up the FMA charts propelled largely by his progressive approach to licensing (Creative Commons BY). Chris Zabriskie recently joined the FMA with 50 Creative Commons BY-NC tracks, and his music has been included in films showcased at festivals such as Art Basel Miami 2011 and in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Costa Rica. (Creative Commons BY-NC) Jenifer Avila's music has been curated by Breitband, a program of Deutschlandradio Kultur, and released by the first Portugese netlabel Enough Records. (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) The Netherlands' Tony Dubshot is well known for his research in transgenic higher dub organisms. He also runs the Dubbhism label (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) Sunsearcher's cinematic rhythms include Dance, Latin, Flamenco, Brazilian, and Big Beat, and with titles like "Movie Rhythm2" he's clearly got filmmakers on the mind (Creative Commons BY-SA) Cranston hails from Wisconsin and was introduced to the FMA by John Badger Farms (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) James Beaudreau is proprietor of Workbench Recordings, a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA netlabel. Flamingo comes to us from Italy's Bad Panda Records, releasing a new Creative Commons mp3 (or in this case, EP) every Monday and they've just hit #100 (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) Nova Scotia's Windom Earle is a collective of friends and musicians who play a mixture of instrumental new wave synth pop and indie rock (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA) |
:: video :: 'Thank You' by Andreas Brixen feat "Something Elated" by Broke For Free, licensed under a Creative Commons-BY license |