ccMixterblog

Leap of the Heart Secret Mixter

2012-01-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

This Valentine's & Leap Year Mix - and get Remixed - in Secret

"Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is." Mason Cooley

Take the leap in a leap year. Join in the secret mixter and remix to your heart's content. Just remember to keep it a secret until upload day.

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience." ~Henry Miller

Image by ChodHound lic. CC-BY-SA

Strike the Root: Lessig & ccMixter Release New Concept Album

2011-11-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

Artists Remix 'Get Money Out of Politics' Message under Creative Commons License

In support of Rootstrikers everywhere getting money out of politics, today Professor Lawrence Lessig releases his new ccMixter album, Strike the Root.

The album features remixes of Lessig's spoken word and the community's original songs, poetry, and samples -- over 100 remixes of open source music were contributed to the Strike the Root Remix Project.

Rootstrikers has just joined forces with MSNBC’s host Dylan Ratigan’s “Get Money Out” campaign with a new organization called United Republic.To enjoy Strike the Root as a CD-quality download, join the ccMixter Green Room. To obtain a physical copy of the Strike the Root CD-Artbook, join the ccMixter Blue Room. For a signed copy of Lessig's new book Republic Lost along with the he Strike the Root download and physical CD-artbook, join the ccMixter Purple Room. All contributions are shared with the artists and nonprofits United Republic and ccMixter.org.

Read the Strike the Root press release.

ccMixter Creates Free Music for Video, Film

2011-09-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

Tubed By You Compositions Expand ccMixter's Music for Film Catalog

ccMixter is recognized as one of the best sites providing music for film and video, under CC license. The demand for free, quality music for video is high, and at ccMixter, any track with a CC BY license may be used for YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, etc. -- as long as all contributing artists are Attributed.

Tubed BY You is a remix event where Mixters create and record original samples and pells to be remixed, recombined, rearranged and shared at ccMixter, and beyond. Participate and help increase 'music for film' catalog under CC BY license.

Snowflake, Loveshadow Release Album 'Open In The Garden'

2011-09-06T14:08:00.000-07:00

ccMixter Artists Demonstrate Power of CC Collaboration

ccMixter is pleased to share Open In The Garden by ccMixter artists Snowflake & Loveshadow. The album also includes contributions from Abstract Audio, Alex Beroza, airtone, Jeris, Ivan Chew, and library owl.

To listen, click the album cover. To dive into the songs, click 'Lyrics' by each song title for lyrics, credits and stems. Be sure to view the artbook that features artwork by various artists, under Creative Commons license.

To download Open In The Garden in CD-quality, with the high-res artbook, support Snowflake's music and become a Green Room member.

We're honored ccMixter helped make this release possible. Peace.

Beach Blanket Secret Mixter

2011-07-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

This Secret Mixter could possibly be the best yet! From tracks to sing around a campfire to mixes worthy of dancing all night long, the folks at ccMixter have created some of their most prolific works yet with the Beach Blanket Secret Mixter.

Discover who remixed who (we recommend listening in headphones). Then, download your favs and make a playlist for the beach.

Image beach blanket by nick perez under CC license.

Strike the Root: ccMixter Remixes Lessig

2011-04-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." ~ Henry David Thoreau

ccMixter.org is 'Striking the Root' -- with music.When Dr. Lawrence Lessig asked ccMixter to create a remix event around his 'Rootstrikers' project, we were honored and energized. As most of you know, Dr. Lessig helped create ccMixter with Creative Commons, Neeru Paharia and Victor Stone back in 2004. The site launched with David Byrne, The Beastie Boys, and Cee-Lo through the Wired Magazine Project.

Remix Larry Lessig -- and many others. At ccMixter, artists will record and contribute pellas, spoken word, samples, and remixes for the Strike the Root Remix Project. Lessig is encouraging worldwide participation at rootstriker.org where people can share their personal stories about corruption -- how it's impacted their lives, with ideas on how to fix it.

As artists, we believe we can facilitate a musical discussion – where the darkness of corruption can be lightened by sharing, collaboration and creativity. In music, striking the root chord (basse fondamentale) is fundamental to a song’s structure, and it rings throughout.

A special thanks to Heather Offord for painting 'Roots' and contributing this beautiful artwork to the Strike the Root Remix Project.

To support ccMixter and the Strike the Root Remix Project, become a contributing member at TuneTrack. During the project, 10% of membership patronage will be contributed to Lessig's nonprofit Fix Congress First.

Read the press release.

ArtLab Emergence Remix Event

2011-02-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

image: The Elder by Jim Yuran

The Hook's "ArtLab Emerges" is the latest ccMixter podcast from Spinningmerkaba featuring ArtLab curator Jim Yuran. Jim speaks about his art, and how music influences his work. Sonic installation by ccMixter.org remixers participating in the Emergence Remix Event.

Listeners can also view the art at The ArtLab Listening Lounge. Check it out: http://tunetrack.net/artlab

Holiday Music: Free mp3's to Share in the Season of Giving

2010-12-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

image: Happy holidays by Nathalie Pelletier

Share music this holiday season by downloading cc licensed mp3's and adding them to your playlist(s). Here are just two examples of what you'll find in our collection.

PEace by Loveshadow

Sevivon by Lancefield

Do you want to explore the collection further? Dig into the archives at dig.ccmixter.org

Mixters create their own playlists too. Check out Snowflake's Peace of Winter playlist. A special collectors edition of this curation is available by visiting Snowflake's Tunetrack website. Peace of Winter proceeds, if you choose to contribute, help support the Dalai Lama Foundation. More free holiday playlists will be tweeted or links added here in the coming weeks.

Happy Holidays from all of us at ccMixter!

ccMixter Answers ASCAP with FREEDOM TO SHARE PROJECT

2010-08-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

ccMixter is a collaborative community that uses Creative Commons licenses. ASCAP is the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers.

The Freedom to Share Remix Event especially honors the art of writing and composition. ccMixter is a place where writing and composition are uniquely honored through collaboration.

ASCAP recently started a fund-raising campaign for a fight against Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge claiming Creative Commons licenses undermine copyright, somehow forfeiting artist royalties. We've found rather the opposite to be true, as ccMixter thrives from the creative freedom and opportunity inherent in sharing our work under Creative Commons licenses.

As artists, WE should have the freedom to choose how we share our work. Creative Commons licenses are an innovative way for us to retain ownership, and yet also give us the freedom to choose how our work is used and reused. We do not sacrifice ownership by sharing our creative product under these licenses, nor do we necessarily give up our right to receive royalties (depending on the Creative Commons license under which a work is shared).

An "official" ccMixter response was considered. But our creative, collaborative process speaks for itself. Our creative works are more powerful than words. Thus the "Freedom to Share" remix event was born!

Visit this ccMixter forum post to learn more about the project.

Through this project, as a community, we will create a body of work that not only comments thematically on the issues raised by this debate, but that demonstrates practically the power of creative collaboration using Creative Commons licenses.

Thanks for participating in the Freedom to Share Remix Project -- and for demonstrating the power of Creative Commons and the ccMixter community.

Poolside Secret Mixter Playlist for Your Listening Pleasure

2010-06-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

The Secret Mixter is wrapped up! It was another creatively-expansive experience....and hearing the tracks is a sonic summer treat. We recommend listening to the entire Poolside Secret Mixter playlist, and definitely more than once!

The Poolside Secret Mixter Is On!

2010-06-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

Today assignments for the Poolside Secret Mixter went out to all the Mixters that signed up. Upload day is June 20 so mark your calendars - more than 40 tracks will uploaded that day...and we can't think of a better way to usher in the Summer Solstice (or Winter for the Southern Hemisphere).

The Secret Mixter is a musical party you won't forget.....see you on upload day!

dig ccMixter is Coming

2010-03-13T21:19:00.001-08:00

just sayin...

ccMixter Biodiesels into Texas

2010-02-10T18:55:00.000-08:00

Photo by Gurdonark; CC BY 3.0

This morning I drove an hour to the elegant Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine, Texas. I went to hear a performance by Snowflake and Spinningmerkaba at the National Biodiesel Conference. The performance began at 9 a.m. sharp, kicking off the general session, attended by a highly sustainable crowd of hundreds upon hundreds of people seated comfortably in the huge Texan Ballroom. The tech at the conference was impressive, featuring not only lights, camera, and audio, but also action. Even my digital camera created optical illusions.

Snowflake and Spinningmerkaba have performed at this conference since 2004. Snowflake handled the keys, while Spinningmerkaba handled the guitar. Each handled the vocals.I handled the role of the anonymous spectator in the third row. Snowflake explained about ccMixter and the 4R project. She gave due credit to the dozens of folks who submitted dozens of remixes to the project. The audience around me proved quite interested. Folks took digital camera photos and listened attentively.

They played Wellman's version of "Harmony", giving it an extra improvisational lilt in the chording that worked very well. Then they played Spinningmerkaba's take on "Biodiesel Family", which discusses in a light tone the many disparate and impressive voices in the biodiesel movement.

Thanks to a modern invention called the cellular telephone, I was able to connect with them and get admitted to a thing I believe is called a "Green Room". A "Green Room" in this particular wonderland is a place in which a really hip video monitor shows folks within the room action onstage, for the benefit of those not immediately on the stage to enjoy the experience while off the stage. As a purely ambient spectator at the event, I found this room an excellent way to participate in a kind of furniture music way, by sitting on actual furniture. I was able to get to meet Snowflake and Spinningmerkaba in person, which was a joy. We talked about all those things they talk about in Alice in Wonderland, except that I always get mixed up as to what is cabbages and what is candlewax and what is kings in the poem, and so I cannot be more precise here. What I heard of the conference, by the way, was very interesting--tech-savvy, impressive and yet very down-to-earth. I'd have loved to have heard all the science talks. They even had a dialogue about the utility of castor oil. The panelists and speakers I got to hear were detailed, practical and free of needlessly clubby jargon.

After a while, Snowflake got up to help present some cool awards to deserving folks. Then Snowflake and Spinningmerkaba were joined onstage by National Biodiesel Board Chairman, Ed Hegland, and CEO, Joe Jobe [pictured with them above], for a cool rendition of a song called "Time for a Fuel Change". Our friends Snowflake and Spinningmerkaba are the leftmost folks pictured above

I got to meet a goodish number of friends and supporters of the artists, who came by the Green Room after the morning session ended to wish them well. We all spoke to a charming fellow named Chuck Zimmerman with an audio device from the website Domestic Fuel, who had us tell the story of the ccMixter 4R project.

I quizzed him about his cool audio equipment, which seemed particularly well-suited to the task.

Here in Texas things tend to be outsize and people tend to be friendly. On a chilly north Texas February day at a huge ballroom, I enjoyed hearing Creative Commons music being played for a mass of folks. Several people expressed an interest in downloading the Mixter music. Soon the time came for me to return to the world of my day job in law, and for my fellow mixters to head to the airport for a further rendezvous with destiny in another city.

I really enjoyed meeting Snowflake and Spinningmerkaba. I realized that they were only my 2nd and 3rd in person mixter meetings. I've been using Spinningmerkaba samples for years. The whole experience made me want to see more Creative Commons events here in Texas. I must work on that.

Sharing rather than taking

2010-01-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

The story of music in the technological age features heroes, villains, and a vast sweep of people who fall between the neat and easy classifications. I think lately about the early songcatchers. In the United States, folks like Alan Lomax recognized the virtue in using the advent of recording technology to capture folk, blues, gospel and rural music. In so doing, folks like Lomax helped propagate worthwhile music and spread it into mass culture. It's no over-statement to say that most of the modern pop, country, hip-hop and rock music we hear today shows direct influence from the process of introduction of these "folkloric" or "roots" forms to the recording industry.

The conundrum arises from the way the early songcatchers profited from this process. Lomax himself copyrighted songs he "captured", without crediting or sharing with the actual authors.A discussion of the issue is contained, for example, in this radio transcript. The list of songs is long (and chart-topping) which were appropriated from their original roots and then used to make profits for the "songcatchers" who admirably publicized them, but dishonorably did not share the profits. The story is all very complex, and in the case of the early songcatchers, there are many good points and bad points, to my way of thinking. Yet, sadly, the view of folks like the UK folk preservationist Cecil Sharp ruled the day. Sharp said:

"A collector who takes down a song from a folk-singer has an exclusive right to his copy of that song. It is always open to someone else to go to the same source, exercise the same skill and so obtain a right to his copy.”

Through Sharp's efforts, a folk music revival launched in the UK which extended for decades, and arguably continues today. Composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams created a nationalist UK classical tradition that won over generations of listeners. The recordists of the music got the royalties. The creators of the music, when fortunate, got stray and often incomplete attribution.

I will not tarry over the many travesties of the recording industry treatment of artists and authors in the 1950s-1970s. The British Invasion bands typically liberally borrowed/appropriated or even merely covered American blues classics without paying royalties. Record labels routinely did not pay the royalties they promised to pay, and only remedied this in insufficient part under the threat of litigation. The recording industry contract remains a form of unfortunate financing at exorbitant rates, funded by a consortium that once held marketing sway over the shelves from which consumers purchased, and now flounders a bit from the change in technology. All that's pretty well known on our board, and it's not worth burning a candle to shed further light on it.

Where I will tarry is to pose the fundamental issue of Creative Commons music.
I hope you will pardon me if I make a few assertions. I believe very much in attribution-only Creative Commons music licensing, and in attribution non-commercial Creative Commons music licensing. Among the genres to which I listen, including ambient, post-rock, chill and the music defined by the woefully non-descriptive [and usually inaccurate] term "experimental music", a sub-culture of freely-licensed music has expanded listener bases and created a niche culture of "netlabel music". Similar things have happened among my friends who listen to electronica and techno music. The explosion of tiny labels has created the proverbial wheat-from-chaff problem, but the amazing thing is how many listeners enjoy all the wheat-and-chaff.

So let me posit a few things that I do not think will be controversial, but which I set out for the sake of discussion:

a. our liberal licensing cause streamlines our permission to use our works if we get due attribution. Speaking for myself, I have a day job, and see the importance of this sharing as reflected in the wonderful structures that have arisen in the wake of shared music. The wonderful ambient netradio Stillstream elected not to fight the internet radio royalty battles of a few years ago, and switched to all-CC and liberal permissions music. The result has been a vibrant radio station, with listeners from around the world, to whom ambient artists regularly go to give free on-line live concerts.

b. the point of sharing culture is not only to get attribution, but to give it.
The point of making music freely available is not only to give music, but to participate in the joy of listening to others' music. In this vein, I mention the wonderful interview in essential netlabel on-line magazine Phlow with Thomas Raukamp, of the also essential CC-focused Beat Magazine, and the discussion in the article and comments.

c. a necessary corollary is that our goal is to see each artist we sample get attribution and credit, too.

d. I believe that a few folks in CC culture worry a great deal about how to make CC music "more mainstream". The problem of the right business model for sharing music is understandably a key concern to many now. I am not of the open source camp who insist that no commercialization of music is possible in light of the ease of sharing via person-to-person file sharing. I believe that people can and will pay for music.

Yet I think that we who make CC music should recognize that our sharing model goes beyond a traditional "business model". Rather than figuring out how to service the consumers of the brave new soft-studio world, we are instead creating a new way of experiencing music culture. I suggest that this way has more in common with the analog world of the 19th Century than with the mid-20th Century recording industry.

In our time of a "new parlor music", we buy software and hardware in the way an early generation bought pianos (or autoharps) and sheet music. We then create and remix songs to be used in the parlor pursuits of our time--youtube videos, recordings, websites, weblogs and scads of other creative expressions. We do not need to be bound up in 'will it sell?' or 'can I get this into a movie or vidgame'?

I submit there is a positive virtue in the sharing itself. I submit that we can create a culture of listeners to shared music who will experience and enjoy the music itself--and that this has a virtue beyond notions of "page views", ad revenues, licensing fees and business models. Yet:

e. for all of the folderol (which I love and yet am bemused by) about 'free music',
our sharing culture is not 'intended to' require people to give their music away for free. Our sharing is instead intended to make a gift of the right to listen and share--whether the motive be altruistic, exhibitionistic, loss-leader-ish, or NIN/Radiohead savvy.

I am a bit familiar with mail art, in which calls I have participated a bit. In that arena, the expression "mail art and money don't mix" reflects the dramatic rejection of any commercial exploitation of the medium. I do not mean to speak for mail artists (for whom I am not qualified to speak, both because I was never that active, others are much more 'real' than I am at that pursuit, and because there is not "one view" in its Eternal Network of participants). Yet my own understanding is that the rejection of commercial pursuit of mail art was seen as a further repudiation of a bloated gallery system seen as rigid, unappreciative of artists, and bound by a gallery construct that technology (in this case, efficient mails) rendered unnecessary.

Yet as much as I admire mail artists, I do not think we need emulate them. I go further--our goal is not to liberate artists from making money, but to license work to people to help them make creative material. I think it would be a sad story indeed if we were liberated from corporate megalith record company control of recorded music, only to see a world in which musicians being able to make money from music is considered a sin. I follow with intrigue as some of the pioneer netlabel experiment with a few paid-CD releases, only to meet an outcry that they have 'betrayed' their mission as free-music-netlabel.

I don't have some grandiose point that's different from what we all think about on these topics. I set this all out without a grand conclusion, and without a sure moral to my story. Yet I keep pondering two ideas--
--surely this sharing of music is about more than some odd circulation of demos in an outdated, outmoded carnival of seeking some mythical "deal", and
--our technology and our liberal licensing has and will inevitably change music. But the need to have a professional set of musicians who help define our culture will not change, and our shared music, in and of itself, is neither its bane nor its salvation.

I admit to a purity of faith. I believe we do something very important at ccMixter, and in netlabels, and in every similar form of sharing. My faith goes further--
though I think we need not change the "business of music", I think it likely that we can help do so. In this connection, I think that dogma about "free beer" is less important than nimbleness about freedom from an old, oppressive system, and a desire that artists, freed by technology, free music to become an indie, small-business profit-making pursuit. I don't think it essential that we 'remold the music economy'. Quite the contrary. But I think it possible--if we keep a faith in the power of this sharing culture to do so.

Frostbite

2009-12-29T15:45:00.000-08:00

Check out this very cool new video by State Shirt for his latest song "Frostbite"

Peace of Winter Release Unites Top Open Music Sites Jamendo.com and ccMixter.org

2009-12-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

ccMixter artists received a warm welcome from the Jamendo.com music community last week with thousands of listens, hundreds of downloads, great reviews and a press release for Snowflake's collaborative holiday album Peace of Winter which was released by ArtisTech Media on November 24th. The joint effort between Jamendo and ArtisTech Media marks a new chapter for musicians that publish under creative commons licenses. Take a listen!

Of course you can download remix and share all the stems and pellas used to produce Peace of Winter! Here are links to the contributing artist's ccMixter webpages: Loveshadow, Snowflake, airtone, Leza2unes, ditto ditto, Brad and Periel Stanfield, @nop Lancefield, Sackjo22, Morgantj, RadioZero, unreal_dm, CiggiBurns, DJ Quikpik, Thomas PhUsIoN, spinningmerkaba, Scomber_JNR, Scomber, Fourstones, narva9, mcjackinthebox, Songboy3, Wellman. These links are also posted within Peace of Winter's page at Jamendo, along with information regarding Jamendo listens, downloads, and reviews.

The folks at Jamendo.com also sent a press release to their community regarding Peace of Winter's release on Thursday of last week. ArtisTech published the same release online today Monday, December 7th, 2009 to coordinate with Twitter's #musicmondays. Read Press Release Here: http://bit.ly/7Fq6vs

Fourstones Curates Above Ground for the Creative Commons and the FMA

2009-11-23T14:11:00.000-08:00

Creative Commons invited ccMixter's very own Fourstones to curate the first playlist in their Curratorial Mix Series on the FMA!- Here is what Fourstones has to say about his "Above Ground Playlist":

"For all the activism in the Open Music movement, nothing pushes the ball forward like brilliant, evocative music. While there is plenty of underground music of all sub-genres at ccMixter, there is also a growing collection of mainstream, above-ground producers who understand the value of sharing as a means of boosting their own creativity along with their exposure."

This playlist represents a sampler of "straight" pop and R&B done by producers who have an ear for the popular without sacrificing artistry.

The Original Mix at ccMixter

The Brooklyn Museum Exhibitions: Who Shot Rock & Roll: Remix!

2009-11-17T11:16:00.000-08:00

Good News for Mixters!

ccMixter is mentioned several times as the place to go to get CC licensed stems and pell's for Brooklyn Museum's Who Shot Rock & Roll Remix Contes t.

Chris Stein, guitarist and founding member of Blondie, has released samples for this contest that are CC-NC-SA and available to the all of the ccMixter community for use. Unfortunately, only U.S. residents can submit remixes to the contest. Don't let that stop you from doing a mix though! Download Chris' files below.

Who Shot Drum and Bass by brooklynmuseum

For more Exhibition Details visit their website

Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum
with guest curator Gail Buckland.
October 30, 2009–January 31, 2010

ccMixter Transitions to ArtisTech Media

2009-10-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

Important news from the forum:

October 28, 2009 (San Francisco/Diego, CA) – We announce that Creative Commons is transferring operations of top remix site ccMixter.org to next-gen-music-label ArtisTech Media (ATM).

ccMixter Transitions from Creative Commons to ArtisTech Media

Please follow the links to read more.

Dear Fellow Mixters

What does the transfer of operations to ArtisTech Media (ATM) mean to you?

Victor's Take on the Transfer of Operations to ATM

Secret Mixter 7 alert

2009-10-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

Sign-up before Oct.21 for a special b-day edition of Secret Mixter with special guest DJ Vadim. What a treat. :)

Curious to find out more about Secret Mixter? (see the FAQ)
More secret_mixter on this blog.

more secrets

Thoughts from a Stone

2009-10-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

I just caught this interview with Victor by Elpida Makriyannis of OLNet. Such a humble guy, and I for one am thankful for all the hard work he puts in on so many levels. I know from personal experience it's hard to stay jazzed about long term projects sometimes, but his work and motivation to constantly improve the mixter inspires others like to me to get and stay involved.

coffeeeurope Savvy ccMixter Promo

2009-10-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

Check it out...

Eric Wahlforss, breiPott, Berlin

2009-10-02T07:51:00.000-07:00

Berlin could be the most important city for music of the current times. And yes, I'm including London, LA and New York, all of which I've had extended stays in the last 12 months. The amount and variety of activity going on here is overwhelming, from the Ableton headquarters to the Turkish pizza joint with two decks that come alive 4 nights a week.

I had a great coffee chat with one the more influential types on the scene, Eric Wahlforss. We discussed the current state of affairs and other gossip over coffee (which seriously kicks ass all over Berlin) and fresh mint tea. Eric is one of the founders of Sound Cloud and is yet another dude seriously on the ball. SC has had explosive growth in the year and they are currently handling 4,000 uploads per day (!)

We talked about the possibilities of using SC as a back end for ccM - meaning: they store the files we upload. There would be quite a few benefits to us, not the least of which would be a lot less maintenance, files that converted to many other formats and a rich API for doing all kinds of fun hacks. Of course he was interested in having a few 1,000 new accounts, many of which would convert to the 'pro' accounts which feature unlimited (or close-enough-to-unlimited) uploads.

He is very humble about it all, but it also turns out, as Forss, Eric is a musician of some credentials and deservedly so. He has had quite a career as an indie electronica musician. There is a ton of his music at his page on Sound Cloud, but the stand out album is Soul Hack. This is pretty great stuff, kind of a cross between Trifonic and Kaleidoscope.

For all the thousands of places to go and things to see, I made it point to visit breiPott, a hipster bar (I don't necessarily mean that in a derogatory way) in a hipster neighborhood (now, it's derogatory) that specializes in playing only Creative Commons music and having several "download stations" where users can browse through gigabytes of CC music for copying (sorry the pictures didn't come out - no flash on the iPhone).

When you find the music you want, you just plug your USB stick into the wall and away you go.

Colaborate >State Shirt

2009-10-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

Want to hear a great track? Here you go - Cassettes, it's the first finished track from the State Shirt Sounds Like You collaborative project. Pretty wicked huh? I can't wait to hear more.

In his words:

The music on my next album will be entirely audio created by you, and I need your help!

Send me drumbeats, noises, guitar parts, a cappella vocals, accordian, part of a song you never finished, spoken words, screaming, your cat. Whatever you're inspired to send. I will merge, tweak, remix and piece together all of your samples and make an album.

The album will be released as a Creative Commons licensed free download. Be a part of the open source music movement.

Be sure to check it out. But don't send actual cats, the postage cost will kill you. ;)

Music Hack Day - Berlin

2009-09-21T03:27:00.000-07:00

Still recovering from Music Hack Day here in Berlin. There are already some great write-ups over at CDM and elsewhere.

This was the second MHD and apparently there is one scheduled for October 21 in Amsterdam and November 21 in Boston. The format is pretty simple: On Saturday morning hackers gather to hear short presentations from API providers. At noon, everybody starts hacking and doesn't stop hacking until noon the next day. A non-stop supply of soda, pizza, Chinese food and shower facilities provided by the hosts (SoundCloud, Ableton, Native Instruments and many others in this case) provide the backdrop for this madness.

One of the recurring themes of this event was "music as software." The is idea is that, as opposed to music being simply a static data file that gets fed into a player, the pieces that make up what we are listening to is (at least partially) generated, composed and mixed on the fly based on a set of rules determined by context - just like software. Music doesn't "play" - it "runs" in non-deterministic real time.

The RjDj presenters call this "reactive music." As an iPhone app, RjDj give composers access to phone's mic/time/location services/accelerator and connects them up to the Pure Data API. (Personally, I love the potential behind having location service influence what you are listening to.)

Ben Lacker from Echo Nest presented what he called "music intelligence" engines that strives to compare music on more than just tempo, key and timing data. Their 'Analyze' API has 20 (!) parameters of timbre they use as points of comparison. They are in the midst of scraping the Web for all the music they can find and running Analyze across everything. Ben's particular specialty is their 'Remix' API which returns a huge hierarchy of data for each Analyze result making it a natural for chopping, time stretching and pitch sifting, but perhaps most importantly and forward thinking: cataloging samples by timbre. Ben was particularly jazzed about our SamplePool/Query API and you can expect to hear more about how they are using CC/ccM content in the near future.

Similar audio analytic engines were presented by Charlie from Cloud Speakers and Peter from Mufin. These services are also scraping the Web, especially webzines, matching data to Music Brainz and acting as aggregators for not only the audio, but also reviews and popularity of tracks. Mufin claims to have cataloged over 7 million pieces of music and presents them back as "sound maps" based on attributes such as 'percussive' and axis such as 'dark' vs. 'light.' Mufin is already being used as a Shazzam like service. Several of the resulting hack projects were Web mash-ups of these APIs with services such as Last.fm and Echo Nest.

Stephen from Native Instruments debuted a new MPC-like controller called Maschine that extends the potential of Reactor and other NI products using MIDI as well the Open Sound Control network protocol. A popular hack project was a pattern-matching game using Maschine to slice and dice sound samples from Street Fighter.

One of the hits of the "science fair" presentations was a toy xylophone wired into a multitude of controllers including the Monome (video at both links provided above), an iPhone (pictured above) and a mind-blowing sequencer iLoveAcid (written in Processor 1.0) by my new hero Jakob Penca. In the context of 'music as software,' the potential of Jakob's tool is nothing short of inspiring, especially when hooked up into a powerful analytical engine such as Echo Nest. On the low end is the ability to find samples based on the timbre of other samples and wire them into iLoveAcid - on the high end, well, it is only limited by one's imagination.

Snowflake's Holiday Project

2009-09-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

Snowflake is honored for the opportunity to create a holiday album benefiting monks and the people of Tibet. Instead of taking on this task alone, Snowflake hopes this project will help demonstrate the power of the Collective by turning it into a ccMixter project. read more

Sept. 23rd is the deadline. More details here.

Call for Producer for a spoken word / poetry album

2009-08-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

A message from Suzi Q. Smith from the forum.

Greetings all,

I hope this day has welcomed you into it with kindness.

Later this fall, I will be recording another spoken word / poetry album (some singing snippets also) and would love help making the project more interesting to listen to.

I would love to work with one person or team to give it a bit more of a streamlined sound through the length of the album . .

interested?

Please let me know if this is something you might enjoy working on!

Check out some of Suzi Q's earlier releases. Below is a video of Suzi Q in action.

Secret Mixter 6

2009-08-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

First off, thanks to fourstones and his technical "rocket surgery". You may not have noticed but Secret Mixter is now fully automated. I for one welcome our new Secret Mixter Overlords.

Now to enjoy the best part. Here's the playlist from Secret Mixter 6

Curious to find out more about Secret Mixter? (see the FAQ)

As always, if you missed it this time, we hope you can join in next time. If you're just listening, we sure appreciate that too. : )

SoundBible.com

2009-08-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

"The Encyclopedia of Free Sound Clips"

SoundBible.com offers thousands of free sound effects, sound clips, and straight up sounds. These sounds can be used in a variety of sound projects including Video Sound Scores, Movie Scoring, Game Design, Powerpoint Presentations, Prank Calls, Sound Boards, and the list goes on.

Bookmark it. :)

Waysidedrive Q&A w/Spinmeister

2009-08-13T22:49:00.000-07:00

...In which an articulate person describes the journey to open music...

Waysidedrive Q&As spin:

I’ve learnt that sharing your music is good. Interacting with other music makers from around the world is kind of a sequential time shifted jam session. At ccMixter, I’ve musically interacted with classical music composers, hard rockers, techno dudes and hip hopsters, DJs, people with advanced music degrees, lawyers, mom’s, lawyer moms, teenagers, video makers, singers, songwriters and a dentist from Bulgaria who sings gregorian chants recorded in a centuries old church. Some world-class full time musicians – and others just taking their first baby steps in music making. I’ve even met people, who don’t play a single traditional musical instrument, but they can take music and sound samples and create collages, textures, and even songs from the various samples. They can hear a short snippet of a sample and remember not only who made it, but often also what bpm range it was and what other samples it might work with.

The "lawyer moms" line is priceless. I'm pretty sure we have lawyer's moms too.

Backmasking My Way Into Your Heart

2009-08-13T15:36:00.000-07:00

From Subliminal,

Backmasking is a collection of remixes I created between 2007 and 2009 during my stay at ccMixter. Other projects cover the rest of the songs written while there. This one focuses on music written to other people's vocal pieces. Exceptions are With Friends Like These and Blind Date, which are both original pieces with ties to ccMixter. With Friends Like These was uploaded there as a sample pack for others to use in their remixes, whereas Blind Date made quite a journey through ccMixter space before coming back home. In the word(s) of ccMixter's favourite dj MC Jack In The Box, enjoy...

Read more about it here. Check out the music here.

Secret Mixter 6

2009-08-06T09:14:00.000-07:00

Get on board and sign up for Secret Mixter 6.

Twilight Under Velveteen Skies

2009-08-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

Ivan Chew has an excellent (very detailed. had I known I would have worked faster. lol) post on his blog about a collaboration/album narva9, colab and myself were extremely pleased to be a part of. Please take a moment to read about it. :)

40 Ways to Download FREE Music Legally - An Ultimate Guide

2009-07-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

An excellent list of places to download great, (guilt) free music. With some kind words about ccM too. :)

"ccMixter is a place where things really get mixed up – in a good way! Here you’ll find tracks that have been remixed by users, some with outstanding results. If you’re getting tired of what you’re hearing now, a visit to this site might refresh your senses."

40 Ways to Download FREE Music Legally - An Ultimate Guide

10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music

2009-07-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

Good to know. 10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music via wired

Help us get the ccmixter Podcast Channel listed on iTunes!

2009-07-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

We're pushing through a grass roots effort to get the ccmixter Podcast Channel added to the iTunes store. Help us out by taking about 90 seconds of your time to fill out a few fields and hit submit. It would be greatly appreciated.

And if you don't know what's on the groove tube, here's a streaming version of the most recent Cool Music show for your listening pleasure......

or check out SackJo22 and The Mixin Kitchen......

Indaba: Carmen & Camille + CC

2009-07-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

Carmen & Camille "Shine 4U" Remix Contest - Indaba Music:

In a bold and unprecedented move, the girls have decided to keep the new mixes under a Creative Commons Attribution license, giving you the opportunity to work with the song to create your own success! This means that you can take your unique mix of this song and distribute and share it freely and sell it, as long as you give Carmen and Camille credit. So, come hop on board with this talented duo and bring your remix of their track to the top of the charts!

Not exactly "unprecedented" but hyperbole aside, as I've said, Indaba gets it.

Allez Cuisine

2009-06-16T15:24:00.000-07:00

"Welcome to the Kitchen" is a very cool new "virtual radio show" hosted by ccmixter's own SackJo22. She describes it as "A tasty musical mix of songs touching on domestic life (as broadly interpreted) harvested from ccMixter."

I checked it out and thought it was pretty cool and pretty awesome.

Rare good music: Ty Burhoe - Sky

2009-06-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

Sky by Ty Burhoe

Ostrowski - Teru: Sin

2009-06-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

Why I am so facinated by remixing

2009-06-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

Flashback to elementary school. One of my teachers had us do Aerobics to this every gym class. I know every change up on this tune like the back of my hand. It is embedded in my consciousness. And I had forgotten about it until about a minute ago. :)

Spice Music now Remix Galaxy

2009-06-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

Good news is Splice Music is back. Renamed Remix Galaxy.

The not so good news is it's completely shifted. So be sure to read the terms and conditions carefully. For example:

4.1 You hereby grant to Company the following rights:

(a) an irrevocable, perpetual, unlimited, transferable, sublicensable, non-exclusive right and license to electronically distribute and sell throughout the Universe via the Service, without any limitation not specifically set forth herein or hereinafter...

Also they charge for stems, if you buy the stems you still need to follow the all rights reserved rules. I am not being critical as it's not any different from most other sites but a shift from the old Splice Music. Just a heads up.

5 Months Stats

2009-06-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Since our highest upload month (ever) in Jan the number of uploads has steadily decreased to numbers slightly higher than last years numbers. The community itself, however, is very active, and engaged, reviewing nearly 2.75 times the amount on the exact same number of uploads as this time last year. It's hard to say (without a lot more number crunching) what it all means.

The astounding number is the unique trackback URLs which is averaging 100/month. Many of those are for older tracks ('Revolve', etc.) but still, just the (uncorrelated) frequency of having 1 URL coming in for every 5 uploads is crazy.


month    reviews  uploads
------- --------  --------
2009-05    1376      379
2009-04    1327      459
2009-03    1131      472
2009-02    1267      497
2009-01    1602      543

DoKashiteru

2009-06-06T15:57:00.000-07:00

Man, how cool are these guys? I was on youtube, typed in "moog" and bumped into these excellent videos. Just a coincidence I guess but it made me think I should mention how much I enjoy their music. DoKashiteru really does make some awesome music.

Gizmo was released a while back, I'm a little late getting on this but I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already. :)

ccMixter is on the air!

2009-06-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our very own fourstones, the age of ccMixter podcasting is upon us. This is something that is obviously near and dear to my heart, as we enable podcast versions of the Cool Music show and more.

For more information about creating podcasts from ccMixter playlists, click here!

Tune in! or better yet, create your own show!

Cool Music Show #50

2009-06-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

Wow. It's been 50 weeks since MC Jack in the Box started his weekly show. Congratulations.

Of course huge thanks go out to him for his dedication and hard work. Spreading the music and making us all feel like stars every week.

So go grab a beverage of your choice and tap your glass against your monitor. Cheers to you. :)

cool music showgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

How Music Works

2009-06-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

How Music Works was last shown on More4 in December 2006.

Why do some rhythms get our toes tapping, while others make us feel mellow? How does a love song bring tears to our eyes? What links African drumming to J S Bach?

In this new four-part series composer Howard Goodall strips music down to its essential parts to find out how music works.

I saw this over at Metafilter. The links are there. I am sure it will interest you too. :)

The Music Instinct - Science and Song

2009-06-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

Just a quick sort of follow up to Victor's post about Indaba...they are having a very cool remix contest called "The Music Instinct - Science and Song", which is being held on their website. Excerpted from their website:

"The Music Instinct: Science and Song, premiering Wednesday, June 24 at 9:00pm (check local listings), is a ground-breaking program that offers viewers a new understanding of the power of music. Music is found all over the natural world and in everyday life experiences. The documentary follows visionary researchers and accomplished musicians, such as Bobby McFerrin, Yo-Yo Ma, Jarvis Cocker, Evelyn Glennie, and Daniel Barenboim, to the crossroads of science and culture in search of answers to music’s deep and abiding mysteries.

PBS, Thirteen, and the producers of The Music Instinct are giving Indaba members a second chance to interact with this exceptionally creative, yet-to-be-released program. We invite you to create a theme for the Music Instinct based around tracks provided by artists from different disciplines, ranging from rock to jazz to world music."

Details here. Entries are due June 19. Submissions assigned a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.

Indaba

2009-05-30T11:24:00.001-07:00

I had a chance to go to the Indaba offices yesterday and hang with Dan Zaccagnino and team for quite a while. (If you were to tell me, just ten years ago that I'd be having a meeting at a fancy dot com across the street from the Bowery Mission, I'd have offered you a free ride to Bellevue.)

Let me get this out of the way: I've had many conversations, over the years, with several musicians' sites, collaboration, remix and otherwise, and these were the first and only guys I talked with that didn't emphasize business model and monetization. In fact, it barely came up at all. At Indaba, I can safely report, the musicians and their needs really do come first and that was a surprising, pleasant relief.

Probably not coincidentally they are great CC citizens, working hard at maximizing the exposure and educating their members on the benefits of liberal licensing. We all quickly came to the conclusion that not only was there a lot of synergy between our sites, but that technically, it would be feasible to connect up in several interesting ways. (I don't want to get too explicit about what we talked about because it wouldn't be fair to them to set specific expectation levels. These guys are busy and where they set their priorities is their business. I will state the obvious however, that as a collaboration tool, these guys are generating a huge pool of stems that, if the Commons could tap into, would be an enormous benefit to everybody. )

The core functionality of Indaba's site is as a collaboration tool and I was, again, pleasantly surprised at how focused and non-distracted they are. The temptations to add all kinds of side-line features are great, but I got the impression that if a feature didn't directly result in a more productive and creative experience for their users, they were not interested in "polluting" the main site with it.

Color me impressed and psyched.

Call For Remixes: DJ Vadim - U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun

2009-05-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

from the Creative Commons blog.

Having played over 1600 gigs in over 60 countries, DJ Vadim is no stranger to the concept of ‘fan interaction’. Beyond his live shows, Vadim pushes experiments with interaction further, having held a remix contest at ccMixter a little under two years ago to promote his album The Sound Catcher. The contest was a great success, and as a result Vadim, active as both a DJ and producer, is back at ccMixter doing the same thing with his latest album U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun.

The contest is in full swing, with winners receiving inclusion in Imaginashun - Power to the people, an album filled “with remixes from pro’s and bedroom producers from around the world” slated for release this autumn. We caught up with DJ Vadim to learn a bit more about his creative process and how he views the changing nature of interaction and communication in music. Read on to see what he had to say.

Get started with the files and info here. : )

loveshadow+songboy3 vs. fourstones

2009-05-15T23:22:00.000-07:00

Look who I found trolling the streets of Greenwich Village - none other than Loveshadow, direct from the UK via a video shoot in Philadelphia, who popped into the city just to hang with his muse Songboy3 who trained in from Queens, with me in the role of tag-a-long. My job tonight was to get out of the way of the love-fest between these two, who had never met before tonight. Hugs, kisses, pizza, more pizza, beer, more beer with a little bit of discussion about the future of the music business but mainly taking shots at me, which I was happy to absorb if it meant hanging with these two.

Love's in town for a quick 36 hours so we quickly put together a night of festivities with Frank (Songboy3) at world famous John's on Bleeker followed by coffee and cookies at Rocco's. But the location and the food hardly mattered as it was all about the personalities. These two are exactly as you might imagine - Loveshadow is witty, sharp and doesn't give an inch, Frank is open with a laugh that could solve all the world's problems.

In case you don't know what all the excitement is about, Loveshadow and Frank are perhaps the most successful pairing of producer and singer that ccMixter has ever produced, both in terms of artistry and popularity. Here's a dynamic playlist of the work they did "together":

St Nikkelbag - Clarance Boddyker

2009-05-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

Check out the new release from Clarance Boddyker and other hip-hop heavies from mixter. Great job guys. : )

A frequent collaborator and contributer to the CC Mixter remixer community website, this album was made by recording rap a capellas in New York City and Manila and emailing and posting the pells on CC Mixter. From there and over the next 4 years, CC Mixter musicians and producers from all over the world swapped the pells over email and created music, remixing the original pells Clarance posted on the CCM site. In the end, after producing the album via email wholly with executive producers Hi Stakes and soulSIDIOUS and several CCM producers, Clarance selected the best tracks from 4 years of CC Mixter posted remixes based on his pells and Saint Nikkelbag was born.

Oh yeah - NSFW.

Handmade Music

2009-05-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

A few weekends ago I had a chance to go a "Hand Made Music" show in Brooklyn. Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music acted as host and wrote it up. I generally struggle with the distraction of process vs. expression but you have to be made of logs to not be impressed with the sheer amount of gadgetry and invention going on here. As far as I'm concerned this is the edge of the envelope when it comes to blurring the lines between man, machine, generated sounds, samples, music, technology and yes, process and art.

Some scenes captured by Peter below:

Create, Share, Experience

2009-05-06T22:07:00.001-07:00

I think about this fellow Charles Dickens. In many and perhaps most ways he was a truly admirable (but decidedly human) man. He rose from poverty and hardship and through pluck and wit made himself into a journalist and a novelist. As with many authors, he suffers sometimes from being crushed between the Scylla-like rock of high school literature classes and the Charybdis-like hard place of smug academic critical disassembly. Yet the reality is that this was a man who could write with popular appeal and with social conscience. I love his finest works, such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield. This was a man who utilized the adulation he received for good and who understood that human frailty and artistic carciature meld together to make the stuff of dreams.

Charles Dickens also proved to be a wonderful argument for (and advocate of) a literary copyright system in the USA. You see, before his day,
nobody much paid royalties of any kind to British authors of literary works. Authors were not immune from our Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin, I am informed, regularly published works by British authors without burdening those authors with the royalties that equity and good conscience might have dictated.

Decades later, Dickens, too, suffered from a system in which American publishers--the industry coalitions of his day--published his wildly popular works in the USA without paying a royalty. Dickens caused controversy, and ultimately helped change minds, through his campaigns for copyright enforcement in the USA. He signed a letter with other authors which read in pertinent part:

"Indeed it may be said that if royalties which ought to have been paid in the United States on the novels of Scott, Dickens, and a host of others, on the dramatic adaptations of their stories, and on the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan when first produced, were now to be handed over with compound interest, Great Britain would no longer be a debtor nation to the United States. The contra account of American authors whose royalties were not paid by English publishers over the same period would be a drop in the ocean by comparison".

This basis for a copyright system, to ensure that authors and artists receive a reasonable protection for a reasonable term, appeals to me. The current copyright laws contain many flaws, in my view, in the term extensions, in the nebulous nature of fair use, and in the absence of sufficient and properly priced licensing structures in the case of recorded music. Yet I think that one thing we in the Creative Commons community need always realize is that our way of working with liberally-licensed material presents the opportunity to remake music culture even in the absence of a single jot or comma changing in copyright law.

I hope you will forgive me a dab of polemic when I say that I've never been interested in remix culture as an excuse to appropriate RIAA culture.
Although I acknowledge the point made by those who klepto-mix, I believe that the way out of the woods of our current media/enertainment system lies in a
less dense clearing. If listeners are going to create a new culture, then they must do more than figure out how to watch pre-release out-takes from the latest big-budget adventure film. A bootlegged Axl Rose or U2 track is not the change I'm seeking. My ambitions are greater than that. Indeed, I am happy to pay (and try always to pay) for any traditional product I wish to hear.

I see a world coming in which a people just give up on traditional record labels. I don't mean misappropriate--I mean ignore. I think there is very little virtue in taking something the rights holder has not licensed one to take. One can find the RIAA litigation strategy odious without believing that everyone should find their "highest good" in copying this week's latest copyrighted retro-soul popster. I believe that to create a new music culture, we must create a new way for music to be distributed. Then the artists we love--indie and major--will make and sell their art in a new and more invigorated way.

I think in this vein, it's important to recognize that what we do is more than a way of finding cool samples to loop and to use in our sequencers. We create things that people can use for free, legally. We don't even need to tilt the windmills of civil disobedience--the college kids seem to have that covered.

What we do is no less than create some of the early set of building blocks of a sharing culture. We don't rip off the modern-day Charles Dickens. We create a sharing culture in which the next Charles Dickens can be located by the crowds, who will then "source" him to fame--and fortune.

In my view, there will always be people who will pay a reasonable sum for works of music. There will always be a need for "musical Charles Dickens" to be both enormously popular and forces for social change. The missing part of the equation now is that today's Charles Dickens, upon signing a conventional entry-level RIAA deal, would find himself bearing all the risks of self-publication, but sadly reaping a much smaller reward for all but the most amazing success.

What we do as music-makers is not likely to have any of us "be" that new musical genius. That's too much to hope for in any set. But we can create a new dialogue with listeners. The dialogue goes like this--"here is music you can download for free. Free music can sound great. You can use free music.
If you like it, you can buy more from the artist. Use it in your vimeo video. Share it with your friends. Then go see the artist live. Buy a CD-quality track. Share. Create. Experience".

What do we do to advance this change? We post songs with liberal licenses. We discuss what we hear and do with our friends on twitter or identi.ca.
We listen to netlabels, and reach out to make further connections. We figure out ways to get liberally-licensed materials in the public library,
in the hands of people with no computer or with slow dial-up connections. We don't have to preach. We just make music, and share, and play.

The way forward is to share music, to talk about sharing music, and to listen to shared music. If artists believe they can sell more songs if they first share, then they will share. Given an "in rainbows" offer, it means paying something for the work, and not downloading for free. It means seeking out live performances by people who share. It means making friends with people who share.

We're not out to rattle the chains of the ghost of Charles Dickens. We're out to exorcise Marley's Ghost from music. What we need to do can be summarized in one word, to cover the music, the dialogue, the listening and the advocacy. It's a simple solution to becoming the change we wish to make.

The word?
"Share".

OpenID enabled

2009-05-01T02:46:00.000-07:00

A huge thank you to Victor for making ccMixter OpenID enabled.

Now anyone with an account with Flickr, aol, Blogger, Yahoo or any number of other sites, including members of the Creative Commons Network, can now get in on the fun.

Using OpenID to log-in to ccMixter? It doesn't get any easier than that. : )

Ljova

2009-04-28T11:00:00.001-07:00

I had the great pleasure to see Ljova (pronounced YO-vah) in the basement performance space at the Cornelia St. Cafe in New York City.

Unlike his somewhat outside uploads to ccM, the show was filled with beautiful melodies. He played with a band consisting of stand-up bass, accordion and percussion. It's very hard to categorize the music in the show, but a lot of it is what I would call 21st century tango, similar, but on a smaller scale, to Piazzolla's Tango Ballet.

I got to talk to him after the show and he was really sweet and promised to upload more to ccM. ;)

From here, he goes to Washington D.C. to play at the Kennedy center and then next week at Carnegie Hall. (This is is pretty much the fourstones schedule as well.)

Earth Day 2009 with Snowflake

2009-04-23T11:56:00.000-07:00

From the forum.

Snowflake was so overwhelmed with the quality and quantity of the responses to her Earth Day challenge that she actually couldn’t pick a favorite: so she picked two!

Congratulation to brad_stanfield for “ Apologize” and his choice of the National Resource Defense Council as his green non-profit, and to radiotimes for “ Sorry” and Green Peace

A donation has been made to each of the green non-profits in your names.

Thanks to Snowflake for her generosity and coming up with this great idea, raising awareness about all these issues in such a fun and creative way.

Check out all the remixes.

Dhammapa: Out of Samsara

2009-04-17T06:23:00.000-07:00

The Dhammapada music company was founded by Peter Pal Hetesi (hepepe.hu) and Marton Zoltan Toth(Minimal Art) remix artists on 22 August 2008.

They came together to compose and perform music that wants to get to a lot of listeners focusing on its own values.

Their music was not marked for an entertaining industry product but for an experience causing meditation and absorption.It is ceremony music for those who are open for their own inner world and for receiving the messages of the universe around them.

The first Dhammapada album (Out of Samsara) is out now. Details on http://www.dhammapadamusic.hu

Remix Scaffolding

2009-04-13T13:21:00.001-07:00

I have to say I love the idea of "posting what you know" like ATX did with this upload (mp3). I don't know why he/she did this but let's assume it's because they specialize in making simple cut & program beats. For someone like me, who dreads the beatmaking process, sometimes that's all you need.

It borders of online collaboration (which most of you know I don't hold in very high regard) but by opening it up this way it jumps the highest hurdle for some of us.

Thoughts?

Celebrate Earth Day 2009 with Snowflake

2009-04-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

Celebrate Earth Day 2009 with one of ccMixter’s star singers, Snowflake. She has challenged the ccMixter community to remix one of her tracks, especially put into the Commons for this event:

“ Apologize”

After all the remixes are posted, Snowflake will pick her favorite remix and include it as a surprise 11th track on her FanClub release “One or Ten” on April 20th. She tells us the remixer will be awarded producer royalties for the track as well.

Best of all, Snowflake will donate $200 to a green friendly non-profit to be chosen by the producer of her favorite “Apologize” remix!

teru featured on CBC Sparks Podcast

2009-04-10T22:21:00.000-07:00

courtesy of narva9's tweet........

Congratulations to teru, the winner of CBC Sparks' kutiman remix contest. Check out the show and the mix :-)

oldDog

2009-04-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

"An over the top and unabashed Romantic tribute". Video by anchormejans. Music by oldDog.

Such a heartwarming display of artists connecting and branching out into different mediums. Anchor Méjans video producing, CiggiBurns dancing and oldDog singing.

Traffic up 23% over last year

2009-04-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

An analysis of visitor data for Q1 2009 shows that 11% more people are coming to the site, hitting the site over 18% more often resulting in overall pageviews up over 23% from the same period last year.

This despite the fact that we've "lost" our biggest referrer: creativecommons.org (Before a site re-design last year, a link to ccM used to be on every page of their site. After the re-design, we are only on the "Projects" page.) cc.org referrals are down 44% as a result but overall referrals are only down 8%, which means we are linked to a lot more than a year ago.

The majority of the growth seems to be non-US, mainly European (excluding France) and South America. (It's tempting to go hog-wild on multi-lingual features but the fact is I refuse to get involved until and unless we can secure a full-time admin/support person for each language we support.)

The numbers are all pretty small by Web standards but it's all enough to swell my head and tells me we're doing OK.

Full details (with real numbers) is here.

Not all Brads Suck

2009-04-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

I thought this was way funny. Or maybe I'm just Out of It (plug).

It's from the forums at BradSucks.net written by one of Brad's fans.

Something funny happened to me, at my school, a teacher saw my Brad Sucks t-shirt and decided to give me a talking to. She said That my shirt is very offending to people named Brad and that i cant wear it. I know the Brads at my school and they laughed at it, haha, so anyways the teacher brought me to the office and my principal was fine with the shirt, he said it was ok since it was a Band and not targeting any specific people at the school as some sort of hate group, lol.

So Brad wrote him a note. : )

Call for Remixes - Kutiman Interview

2009-04-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

Our super-excellent friends at Spark on CBC Radio recently interviewed the amazing Kutiman (wiki) and are seeking remixes to play on the air next week.

Here’s the deal: D/L yourself a copy of the interview (here) Cut out the parts you enjoy most. Mix in a bit of Creative Commons music or sound effects, or whatever else you have the license to remix, and send it back. The best remix gets on the show next week, and the winner scores an ever fashionable Spark Grocery Bag.

Remixes are requested to be 1 minute in length. Upload it to ccM + send an email to Spark with a link to your remix. The deadline is April 6th. The show will air April 8th.

CC Takes it all Back

2009-04-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

***big thanks to VS for the April Fools prank. : )

Lawyers at CC have just discovered that through some arcane configuration of tax-exempt contribution laws, Microsoft who gave its latest 6 figure donation to CC passed a legal threshold and is now claiming ownership all content on CC sites - eventually every upload at ccmixter will be retroactively, 100% owned by Microsoft.

As of 3:00 PM today all downloads on ccM will now be required to include Windows Media DRM and will be made available through Zune.com starting from $2.50 per download. Uploads will now require Microsoft Remix Certification, which can be obtained through a $600 license fee, which can be renewed annually.

Please read this important Press Release.

1 out of 10 Remixes in a Video/Podcast

2009-03-18T01:41:00.000-07:00

In the last few days we passed over 1,000 trackbacks, the vast majority of those are videos and podcasts.

As I right this there are over 8,400 remixes on ccMixter, over 800 of which were used in those videos and podcasts.

That means 1 out of 10 remixes on ccMixter is being picked up in podcasts and videos.

I think that rocks pretty hard.

mixwidget

2009-03-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

Looking for a cool-looking way to showcase music on your website? Check out mixwidget - the open source mixtape.

Mixwidget.org was created by the founders of Mixwit, a digital mixtape service which sadly shut it's doors in December 2008, but they decided to take some time out to build a new mixtape widget for the open source community.

My Inbox

2009-03-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a few things I have missed posting that have been emailed to me recently. I'm sure most of you get the same emails but I thought I'd post just in case. : )

1. Splicemusic.com (offline) has been acquired by RemixGalaxy.com.
2. Jamendo starts Jamendo Pro.
3. Songbird 1.1 is released.
4. RiP: A Remix Manifesto opens in theatres across Canada .

Scomber (a new song every day)

2009-03-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

Scomber is now 1/7 of the way through his "insanely" ambitious new-song-every-day project. Well done on the first 50 days. : )

For anyone who would like to listen to all the tracks so far, he has made it easy to listen, find and keep up on his page over at Bandcage.

Fresh Hot Radio

2009-03-03T23:40:00.000-08:00

From freshhotradio.com

The mission of FreshHotRadio.com is to connect mainstream listeners to web-native music.

The music is born on the web, not on CD.

Sources include netlabels, social sites for musicians, and musicians' blogs.

The playlist is hand-curated, like a music blog.

The interface is simple. Just bookmark this site and come back when you need music.

It's easier and less distracting than Pandora.

I came across duckett while listening to Fresh Hot Radio. I wanted to see what the "embed" looked like. : )

duckett -- THIS IS OUR MUSIC (Thruewiddit mix)

Soda, CDK

2009-02-28T12:12:00.000-08:00

The good news, Rocky Mountain News, a Pulitzer Prize winning Colorado newspaper uses ccM music for a video. The bad news, it's a story about the 150 year old publication's final edition. :(

Video from Matthew Roberts. Music by Soda and CDK +.

**edit- what I also thought was really cool with this video is how they chose two remixes of admiralbob77's piano. One by soda, the other by CDK. It gives the video a constant theme but with slight variation. Pretty cool. : )

teru

2009-02-26T15:51:00.000-08:00

I got a very nice email from Aaron at Escobar Studios letting me know my remix was used for one of their TV spots to promote their cause. The video is named Imagine produced for a non-profit organization, Grupo Caiman.

I was bored

2009-02-22T22:34:00.000-08:00

I made these online at Cool Text: Logo and Graphics Generator. If you need a logo, give it a shot. It's free and super easy to edit. : )

Twitter - ccMixterMusic

2009-02-21T11:04:00.000-08:00

Are on Twitter? Are you a fan of ccMixter? If so then make sure to check out Twitter / ccMixterMusic.

Thanks to narva9 for taking the initiative. Help her spread the latest music and news from ccM by becoming a follower.

DJ Rkod, Luke Tripp

2009-02-19T10:15:00.000-08:00

A CC licensed, student made short film by hmmclunk. Featuring music by DJ Rkod, Luke Tripp and additional sounds from Freesound.

Most Uploads (Ever)

2009-02-18T20:08:00.000-08:00

In case you blinked, January 2009 was the highest upload count in the history of ccM, including the infamous Fort Minor contest month. Thanks to everybody for playing.

Secret Mixter 5

2009-02-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

Isn't it great to see people come together so easily to do something like this so quickly and naturally?

DoKashiteru's remix sparked SecretMixter 5. Once the thread was put up, within the week there were 38 signed up. And thanks to fourstones' multi time-zone programming skills, assignments, emails and uploading were taken care of.

SecretMixter is something that really comes together on it's own and it sounds like I'm not the only once who gets a kick out it. If you missed it this time, we hope you can join in next time. If you're just listening, we sure appreciate that too. : )

Playlist from Secret Mixter 5.

Morgantj

2009-02-13T00:51:00.000-08:00

Poem and video by ozjthomas. Music by Morgantj

Some recent sample highlights

2009-02-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

I haven't said it a while but I have been thinking it. The quality of samples at ccM is just amazing. Just to prove a point I am listing some recent sample highlights. What's incredible here is that all these samples were submitted by members within the last 10 days. Seriously. Damn.

72 Strings and Them Say Piano by The3amAssociation. Flebby Accordion Cesar and Samba Já...zzzz by Cdala. FlyingKowi_strings and money strings 3 by BritishCouncilNZ. Walkman Blues and Baby Bird Acoustic by admiralbob77. Techicolor Lover (rhodes) and Do it Now (clav) by Scomber. Qualquiehmohtreta (Sounds) and Qualquiehmohtreta (Beat) by ThirteenthMonkey. Epic Sweep by illusivemind. 020209 pad 02 and 040209 drums 01 by Morusque. Sampler Jam session by shagrugge. Cold Hard Cash and Bubu Cha Cha by Neurowaxx.

On Avoiding the Three Second Rule

2009-02-08T17:04:00.000-08:00

Tonight prior to posting this I took a surfing tour through the legal authorities on fair use and sampling. Because I am an attorney, and because it is my observation that attorneys generally come off seeming a bit silly whenever they take the witness stand or give legal advice on the internet, I'm never very excited about the idea of holding forth on the legalities of Creative Commons licenses. Suffice it to say that touring pre-CC legal authorities is much less fun, say, than listening to the surf music of the Ventures or to Danger Mouse.

In 1934, there was talk of a 20-second rule. Later, talk of a "three second rule" came--and went. It's all a complicated story. The doctrine of "fair use" becomes an exercise in theology and in epistemology as well as an issue of copyright. The only thing remaining exquisitely alive about the music of 2 Live Crew is the live controversy about how much one can sample and what winds sail one into Pirate Bay.
I'll not bore anyone with any history or legal analysis on all this.

I also hasten to say that I am fully comfortable with the existence of a comprehensive copyright law. If I were given a choice of sharp instruments to take to the existing statutes, I'd vigorously use a scalpel rather than heedlessly use an axe. I favor a complete restructuring of how creators of media and consumers of media interact--but I don't need Congress or Parliament or even the dreaded BUMA to "save us" in order for this "velvet revolution" to occur. I see the revolution as unstoppable, and the legalities as mere way stations on the way to a sharing economy.

I therefore support the right of each of our creators to apply NC licenses to works. I apply them myself, at our netlabel and in individual things I create. I don't see CC as one more dogmatic way for well-meaning people to reduce options for artists. I see CC licenses as tools to increase the options for artists. I am all for mixters being able to reserve the right to license and sell their work. I have even sold a CD or two of my work in the past, as implausible as that may be to anyone who has heard my work. All of that is good.

Similarly, I do not want to criticize any mixter for any license applied to any work in the past. I do not want to cut into the legal and moral rights of anyone to control those property rights granted by our current laws. I want a velvet revolution, and not an armed revolt. I get bored of needless contention. I bathe in conflict, and shower it off at the end of the work day.

Yet so often I see ways that we in the future can, as a community, help one another out. As we move into a "brother can you spare a dime?" phase in our nation's history, we have an historic opportunity to spread music "free as in beer, free as in speech, free as in our hearts and minds and the beats we tap". Some of us--not me, by choice-- can even profit gently from this sharing. But we must work together.

My gentle plea is this:

If you have the killer 'pella that might be something you want to use in a work for sale someday, then by all means license that NC. Similarly, if you do what odd guitar magazines call "shredding", but what I call "being nearly half as cool as Bill Nelson", then license that NC.

But if you are posting a building block sample, like a quick hit or sound, then I ask that you license it BY when you post it. For that matter, as someone who has successfully sold DIY poetry, I suggest that if you have a spoken word track, license it BY, because it's better to be a well-known poet than to be one who obscurely sold a single sample for 100 dollars.

I also suggest that we all begin a dialogue on how, without undue labor or needless organization, we can create an entire soundpool of completely BY samples.

You see, my fellow mixters, I see us as a community of activists, who are all in this together. We are seeing our works go out into the ether as if we were the revolutionaries we intended to be.

All we need is the building blocks to sample to go to places we have never been. Some of us, like mostly me, will never transcend the day job, except as a labor of love. But some of us could take these mixes and go places.

I suggest we begin a dialogue about using the BY license, to help mixters use BY and fly into the popular culture.

We can share music, we can create new music, and we can fulfill dreams. Yet the path to do this lies through the BY license. We ought not have to write one another e-mails (charming as each of you have proven to be) to use 3 second samples of kicks and 7 second guitar lines.

Can't we get BY into a more fun sample place?

ccMixter: A Memoir

2009-02-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

As always we are the lucky beneficiaries of the hard work Victor has made open for everyone. If you have a moment, please read and offer your feedback on this interesting, unique and important perspective on the early years of ccM.

ccMixter: A Memoir

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the RIAA and Love the Unexpected Collaborations of Distributed Creativity During the First Four Years of Running ccMixter

by Victor Stone

February 2009

DOWNLOAD THE PDF

Jaspertine

2009-02-05T20:58:00.000-08:00

「移動インターバル撮影 080705上野」のビデオ
powered by ＠niftyビデオ共有

This may take a moment to upload but it's worth the wait.

A very beautifully shot video walking through the streets of Japan submitted by yoshinaga, hiroshi. With music by Jaspertine.

CC OZ!

2009-01-28T21:13:00.001-08:00

Just got back from a day in Brisbane and spent the better part of the evening with the good folks at CC Australia. The whole evening was put together by the activist, artistic designer, journalist and one helluva party planner Elliot Bledsoe. We started with a round table discussion led by Brian Fitzgerald. The typical international CC office is two, maybe three law grad students porting US CC licenses to make them relevant to the local domain, but it was clear from the jump these people are on a whole different level. The first thing they did was hand me a 200+ page book of local case studies that was two years in the making called "Building an Australian Commons." These are really smart, on it, people. Glad they are on our side, that's for sure. We peppered each other with questions and I learned a lot about some serious differences from the US environment ("Really? No 'fair use'???) It was a blast to see the excitement about ccMixter and it was a joy to spread the message. You guys should be proud - you're world famous and appreciated ;)

One thing I've noticed when talking to CC people anywhere in the world: We all know how to talk about the benefits of CC licensing to culture, to an artists' career (we can all quote/paraphrase Tim O'Reilly's "You should be worried about obscurity, not piracy") and other angles, but what ccMixter has taught me in a way the polemics by Lessig and Boyle could only tell me theoretically was that open licenses enable innovation in the creative process. If you don't believe me just check out what colab said the other day. He knew these guys from the Peter Gabriel (All Rights Reserved) site. The only difference between the remixers he mentions from a few years ago at that site and the same ones at ccM today is access to the Pool enabled by CC. This is a powerful message to tell artists: by embracing the "sharing economy" they have a shot at improving their music. Anyway...

After the official meeting a bunch of us went out for dinner/drinks. I got to talk with Rami from CC Jordan (!) and he owes me six killer 'pells from back home. Overall it was cultural exchange, full throttle.

Thanks to Elliot, Brian, Rachel Cobcroft, Jessica Coates, Emma Carroll, Nic Suzor and a few I'm sure I'm spacing (sorry!) for a great, educational time and for being such gracious hosts.

Dead Man Drinking

2009-01-28T15:32:00.000-08:00

Got an email recently from writer and director Rohan Harris, who I had worked with previously on a short film called “Jumpcut”, which featured a couple of my Brad Sucks remixes. Rohan’s just released his latest effort from down under called “Dead Man Drinking”, and this one features more score by yours truly, as well as mixter contributions from Tacet and Pitx.

The film is released under a CC 3.0 license, and available through archive.org as a free download.

Personally, I love seeing my remixes used in films, even if I get nothing but my ego stroked.

My Facebook Dilemma

2009-01-27T23:27:00.000-08:00

Shagrugge has started a ccMixter group for members and fans at Facebook. And I think this is a great idea in theory.

The dilemma I am facing though is that I am not able to create a musician account for myself without sending them a copy of identification, such as a passport. Which means I have to use my personal profile.

The problems I have with this are:
1) privacy
2) it's totally confusing
3) it's yet another social network ie. MySpace, etc... when really ccM is the only network I need.
4) if I ever get a musician profile, I'll have to switch things over.

I've joined up for now. Because I want to support Shagrugge all I can. But to be honest I have one foot out the door unless I can figure out something.

ps - I hate Facebook
pps- be my friend though. : )

picture made with streetsigngenerator.com.

Secret Mixter 5

2009-01-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

Sign-up for Secret Mixter 5.

Soon to Mix: Drug of Choice by Colin Mutchler

2009-01-26T14:29:00.000-08:00

Hi all, it's been a while since I've shared work, and the music coming outta CCmixter keeps getting better. Thanks to the mixters and MC Jack in the Box for the weekly radio which makes a huge difference. I very much looking forward to hearing what folks like teru, Gurdonark, fourstones and a bunch of new guys I've never heard of, are gonna end up making out two upcoming new a cappella tracks.

Drug of Choice will come to mixter in the next few weeks but I wanted to give you guys a teaser from the acoustic London home video version below. I just uploaded the elements of the second, Mixed Up in the Drive By, that was actually partly born back in September of 2001 in Brooklyn.

Surfs Up Scomber!

2009-01-26T10:18:00.001-08:00

Musician, entrepreneur, reluctant musical-theater buff, surfer - it's scomber!

Got a chance to get together with scomber the other day in downtown Sydney, it was great that he could find his way in from the suburbs - which around here means the best beach communities imaginable. He's the perfect example of someone who's succeeded by staying half a step in front of the rest of us. Lucky for us his latest passion (when he's not cutting up the waves) is ccM.

I have to say, I love hanging with musicians who "get it" - it was quite the love-fest, a lot of "Yea! Right??" We had a great talk (or more like, I talked, I interrupted, I talked some more...) and the good news is that we saved the world. One curl at a time.

The night before I went to the first "arena" concert I'd been to in over 20 years - Neil Young (who couldn't have been better, totally great) with opening act, our very own My Morning Jacket (who maybe couldn't have been better but it wasn't quite my cupotea.)

Kathrin in Sydney

2009-01-23T20:43:00.000-08:00

Had a chance to finally see Kathrin (previously blogged here) perform last night in a small bar/club in downtown Sydney last night. She's in town doing some recording and graciously invited Cindy and I down to the show. Her DJ's PC equipment had blown up during the day and they never got it fixed, so the entire show was cobbled together with bits and snippets that were left lying around inside the sampler and on vinyl. Kathrin has a heavy background in jazz and at several points in the show it was her scatting (authentically!) to just a the barest of funk beats. The crowd was a typical indifferent Friday night bar crowd at the beginning of the show but by the end they were all on their feet massed around the the musicians, dancing and screaming for more.

About halfway through the set I turned to Cin and said, "You know, I think I may have been lying every other time I've ever complimented music." It was a PERFECT night of music. Amazing.

(Pictured: Cindy, on the left, and Kathrin run outside into the humid street where it was record-setting heat, to escape the furnace temperatures inside.)

Another State Shirt Super Badass Remix Contest

2009-01-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

from State Shirt,

Over the last couple months, there have been over 70 remixes of State Shirt songs that have been made by people all over the world, and it’s been really cool to hear everyone’s take on the music. Since it’s been going so well, I figured hey why not have another remix contest? more details

Also a belated congrats to DJ Rkod for his Super Badass winning remix from the first round - Chemma Chi (Disturbed)

Gurdonark - Seven Virtues

2009-01-18T01:33:00.000-08:00

Please take a moment out of your day to listen to this latest release by Gurdonark. Your body and mind will thank you. : )

"The Seven Virtues" comprises seven melodic instrumental pieces, each titled with the name of a virtue. The pieces are minimalist by design and spirit, and each is comprised entirely of the sampled sound of wooden mallet upon Orrefors crystal, processed through the software synthesizer called Sawcutter 2.0. Processing of the sound reflects the facets of the crystal--with an aim to give the sound an atmosphere, and not to process the sound beyond recognition. more

The Sanli Collection Rips Off Artists

2009-01-17T11:23:00.000-08:00

Well respected mixter artist Loveshadow reports that some "original fashion" website took a remix track he actually licensed out for use to another clothing company and pirated it for their website. I'll bet they rip off their designs too.

what a bunch of turkies.

Any pro bono lawyers want to help? contact Loveshadow.

The Sounds of Space

2009-01-16T06:04:00.000-08:00

I'm very partial to the The Jodcast, the podcast of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England. It's got a cool astronomy subject matter, as one might expect of a radio telescope institute's podcast.

One of the many admirable things about the Jodcast is that it makes its programs available under a Creative Commons license. This is the best kind of "science popularizing commons". They hear a sound with a mega-pound-expensive instrument, and they share it with everyone.

I'll see if I can't get a sample pack created, with proper attribution, but I thought in the meantime I'd share the playlist:

The Sounds of Space:
1. The sound of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A recorded by the Lovell Telescope
2. Whistler waves
3. Proton Whistlers
4. Leonid meteor echoes
5. Jovian Chorus
6. Jovian S-Burst
7. Jovian S-Burst speeded up by a factor 128
8. ESA Huygens lander radar signal
9. Solar sounds generated from 40 days of Michelson Doppler Imager data and processed by A. Kosovichev.
10. Solar Energetic Particles data from the HELIOS mission
11. X-ray observations of Cygnus X-1 from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer
12. PSR B0329+54 observations from the Lovell Telescope
13. Vela pulsar observations
14. Crab pulsar observations
15. PSR B1937+21 observations
16. Pulsars in globular cluster 47 Tuc
17. Double pulsar eclipse
18. The first million years of the Universe
19. The Cosmic Microwave Background

This is what I call deep space ambient.

I can hardly wait to do 3 minutes of the first million years of the universe.
Kudos to the Jodcast, and to outer space in general. The only natural limitation upon sampling is the limitation of small, legalistic minds.

Armor All?

2009-01-10T16:37:00.000-08:00

Tapsa, Pitx, Fireproof Babies and Alex Beroza, selling Armor All in Mexico?

http://aceleratusfantasias.com/

Do Not Remix Colbert & Lessig

2009-01-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

If the above video interview of Prof. Lessig on the Colbert Report inspires you to make a brilliant remix, you can find the "acappella" at ccM and when you're done upload it for everyone to enjoy. : )

SC Mixer ft. SilviaO

2009-01-05T18:05:00.000-08:00

Very nice video for Tanto ruido by SilviaO remixed by SC Mixer. Video by Andres Zapata and Juan David Suarez .

The Year in Review(s)

2009-01-01T15:23:00.000-08:00

I was really nervous when I saw the review numbers for Nov. especially when considered a trend (i.e. downward spiral). But the site bounced back strong in Dec. Of course without corollary data it's impossible to guess was going on in autumn but it certainly looks like we get a lot more attention when school is out.


# reviews | month   |
----------------------
      568 | 2008-01 | 
      536 | 2008-02 | 
     1183 | 2008-03 | 
     1221 | 2008-04 | 
      865 | 2008-05 | 
     1218 | 2008-06 | 
     1031 | 2008-07 | 
      756 | 2008-08 | 
      890 | 2008-09 | 
      883 | 2008-10 | 
      695 | 2008-11 | 
     1036 | 2008-12 |

2009!

2009-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

A Cool (but booty) Video

2008-12-31T14:46:00.000-08:00

By the time you read this video will probably be yanked from YouTube (if not the whole account according to the poster). I had to reject it as an official video trackback. Too bad because it's pretty fun (requires a certain length in tooth to fully appreciate):