![Free music](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Free_music.svg)
Free music or libre music is music that, like
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work
A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...
or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does ''not'' mean that there should be no fee involved. The word free refers to
freedom
Freedom is understood as either having the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one's purposes unhindered. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving on ...
(as in
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
), not to
price
A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services. In some situations, the price of production has a different name. If the product is a "good" in the c ...
.
The Free Music Philosophy
generally encourages creators to free music using whatever language or methods they wish. A Free Music Public License (FMPL)
is available for those who prefer a formal approach.
Some free music is licensed under licenses that are intended for software (like the
GPL
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
) or other writings (the
GFDL
The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the r ...
). But there are also licenses especially for music and other works of art, such as
EFF
EFF or eff may refer to:
Politics
* Economic Freedom Fighters, a South African communist political party
* Economic Freedom Fund, an American political organization
* Election Fighting Fund, a British suffragist organization supporting the ear ...
's
Open Audio License
The Open Audio License is a free music license created in 2001 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
It provides freedom and openness of use for music
Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some comb ...
,
LinuxTag
LinuxTag (the name is a compound with the German language, German ''Tag'' meaning Diet (assembly), assembly, conference or meeting) is a free software computer expo, exposition with an emphasis on Linux (but also BSD), held annually in Germany. Li ...
's
Open Music License, the
Free Art license
The Free Art License (FAL), (french: Licence Art Libre (LAL)) is a copyleft license that grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works.
History
The license was written in July 2000 with contributions from the mailin ...
and some of the
Creative Commons Licence
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...
s.
History
Before the
advent of copyright law in the early 18th century and its subsequent application to music compositions first, all music was "free" according to the definitions used in
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
or free music, since there were no copyright restrictions. In practice however, music reproduction was generally restricted to live performances and the legalities of playing other people's music was unclear in most jurisdictions. Copyright laws changed this gradually so much so that in the late 20th century, copying a few words of a musical composition or a few seconds of a sound recording, the two forms of music copyright, could be considered criminal infringement.
In response, the concept of free music was codified in the Free Music Philosophy
by
Ram Samudrala
Ram Samudrala is a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the University at Buffalo, United States. He researches protein folding, structure, function, interaction, design, and evolution.
Education and career
Samudrala receive ...
in early 1994. It was based on the idea of ''
Free Software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
'' by
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
and coincided with nascent open art and open information movements. Up to this point, few modern musicians distributed their recordings and compositions in an unrestricted manner, and there was no concrete rationale as to why they did it, or should do it.
The Free Music Philosophy used a three pronged approach to voluntarily encourage the spread of unrestricted copying, based on the fact that copies of recordings and compositions could be made and distributed with complete accuracy and ease via the Internet. First, since music by its very nature is organic in its growth, the ethical basis of limiting its distribution using copyright laws was questioned. That is, an existential responsibility was fomented upon music creators who were drawing upon the creations of countless others in an unrestricted manner to create their own. Second, it was observed that the basis of
copyright law
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", had been perverted by the music industry to maximise profit over creativity resulting in a huge burden on society (the control of copying) simply to ensure its profits. Third, as copying became rampant, it was argued that musicians would have no choice but to move to a different economic model that exploited the spread of information to make a living, instead of trying to control it with limited government enforced monopolies.
The Free Music Philosophy was reported on by diverse media outlets including ''
Billboard
A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...
'',
''
Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...
'',
''Levi's Original Music Magazine'',
''
The Free Radical'',
''
Wired
''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...
''
and ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
''.
Along with
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
(a free operating system),
copyleft
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
licenses, the explosion of the Web and rise of
P2P
P2P may refer to:
* Pay to play, where money is exchanged for services
* Peer-to-peer, a distributed application architecture in computing or networking
** List of P2P protocols
* Phenylacetone, an organic compound commonly known as P2P
* Poin ...
, the cementing of
mp3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
as a compression standard for recordings, and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely the reality in the early 21st century.
Organisations such as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...
and
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
with free information champions like
Lawrence Lessig
Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...
were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavours of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.
Record labels and websites distributing free music
*
Audition Records
Audition RecordsArchive.orAudition Records Collection is an e-magazine project born in Berlin in 2010. Audition RecordsAudition Records is a monthly e-magazine of Improvised Music and radical contemporary concepts focusing efforts on publishing a ...
– free and non-free CC licenses
*
Dogmazic
Dogmazic is one of the primary free music download managers in France. Dogmazic was created in December 2004 by the Bordeaux-based ''Association Musique libre!'', a major proponent of the French free music movement.
Dogmazic's database contains ...
– free and non-free CC licenses, GNU GPL
*
Free Music Archive
The Free Music Archive or FMA is an online repository of royalty-free music. Established in 2009 by the East Orange, New Jersey community radio station WFMU and in cooperation with fellow stations KBOO and KEXP, it aims to provide music under Cre ...
– free and non-free CC licenses
*
Jamendo
Jamendo is a Luxembourg-based music website and an open community of independent artists and music lovers. A subsidiary of Belgian company AudioValley, and Independent Management Entity (IME) since 2019.
Originally, Jamendo was a music platform ...
– free and non-free CC licenses, Free Art License
*
Incompetech
Kevin MacLeod ( ; born September 28, 1972) is an American composer and music producer. MacLeod has composed over 2,000 pieces of Production music#Royalty-free libraries, royalty-free library music and made them available under a Creative Comm ...
- CC-BY, paid licenses available
*
Loca Records
Loca Records is a British independent electronica and post rock record label based in Brighton, England. All the music, artwork and videos are released under copyleft licenses and distributed physically on gramophone record, vinyl, Compact disc ...
*
Magnatune
Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003. It only sold music for download through its website but added a print-CD-on-demand service in late 2004 and in October 2007 began selling co ...
*
Opsound
Opsound is a website which aggregates links to music released under Creative Commons licenses. Opsound aggregates links to music hosted on other servers, as well as providing discussion forums and organizing real-world events and concerts. It has ...
*
Musopen
Musopen Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in Tarzana, California, launched by Aaron Dunn in 2005. It aims to "set music free" by providing music to the public free of charge, without copyright restrictions.
Mission and charit ...
Notable bands distributing their music under free or close-to-free conditions
Note that some licenses, such as CC-BY-NC, are not free by definition.
Creative Commons NonCommercial, any version (#CC-BY-NC)
/ref> However, works under these licenses are listed here as being related to the topic.
See also
* Copyleft
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
* Deezer
Deezer is a French online music streaming service. It allows users to listen to music content from record labels, as well as podcasts on various devices online or offline.
Created in Paris, Deezer currently has 90 million licensed tracks in i ...
* Free Culture movement
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, ...
* File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...
* Guvera
Guvera was an online music and entertainment streaming service founded in 2008. Guvera had agreements with the music labels in the regions where the product was available, which allowed for legal free music streams. As of May 2017, Guvera has ...
* Libre.fm
Libre.fm is a music community website that aims to provide a Free Software replacement for last.fm. The website was founded in 2009 by Matt Lee.
Libre.fm can optionally store a user's listening habits using information sent to the website's ...
* List of musical works released in a stem format
The following is a list of musical works that have been released legally in a stem format for public use.
With the growing availability of amateur music-making software such as GarageBand, it has become possible for the general public to more e ...
* Mutopia Project
The Mutopia Project is a volunteer-run effort to create a library of free content sheet music, in a way similar to Project Gutenberg's library of public domain books. It started in 2000.Portal page at thInternet ArchiveRetrieved January 24, 20 ...
* Open music
* Open Music Model
* Podsafe
Podsafe is a term created in the podcasting community to refer to any work which, through its licensing, specifically allows the use of the work in podcasting, regardless of restrictions the same work might have in other realms. For example, a so ...
* We7
Blinkbox Music (originally We7) was a free, advertising supported, music streaming service, with over 12 million tracks available for streaming in the UK and Ireland, with content from the music industry, and most independent labels and distribu ...
* Wolfgang's Vault
Wolfgang's (formerly Wolfgang's Vault) is a private music-focused company established in 2002 dedicated to the restoration and archiving of audio and video concert recordings and the sale of music memorabilia. It began with the collection of the p ...
References
External links
The etree.org wiki
etree pioneered the standards for distributing lossless audio on the net.
Free Music Licenses
{{DEFAULTSORT:Free Music
Music industry