A friend of mine has been creating original music for years. James is passionate about his music, happily shares it with others, and is truly delighted whenever someone likes it!
While donations are always happily received, he explicitly did not want to charge money for his music. His CD release parties usually involve handing out free copies of the new CD to everyone at the venue who would like to listen to it, and encouraging people to download entire albums from his website. At this point he’s released 5 albums, with another one due to release soon. You can download all of these albums, in their entirety, from his website.
Despite not charging for his music, he also did not want anyone stealing his original composition music. So, a few years ago, after quite a bit of homework, he settled on using Creative Commons on all his music.
Now, thanks to James’s Creative Commons licensing and with help from justdave, whomever first dials into a Release meeting can now listen to “Reflective Moments” by General Fuzz. If you like it, you can find all his other works, in their entirety at www.generalfuzz.net. It would make James happy! 🙂
While it doesn’t matter much in this context, it is important to remember that Creative Commons is a bunch of very different licenses, free and non-free.
Most sites require checking the link to find out what the license is (which is a bit annoying), but worse stuff does happen. Just look at this misuse: http://tiraecol.net/modules/comic/