A lot of people have been asking us why we released our first album on the unrestrictive terms of a Creative Commons license while at the same time selling it physically and digitally through the traditional channels of music distribution.
First of all, releasing What to Do and How to Do It on a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license is a very clear way of communicating to the users of the album what uses we think are fair. We love when people make remixes and mash-ups and thus combine old works to create new ones. By allowing non-commercial uses and derivatives everyone can use our music, e.g. as background for a Youtube-video or post remixes on a blog. However, if you want to use the music for a commercial or release the remix commercially, you’ll have to ask us first and agree to a contract.
Another reason is that our problem as a band without even a minor indie-label to promote our music, is not so much that we lose money because music-lovers have access to our music for free via P2P filesharing, but rather that most have never heard it before. By making the music freely available and allowing fans to pay what they want as a donation (even if that means paying nothing), while at the same time releasing it through the ordinary channels we create more value by making it easier for the music to find its way to those ears that will find it interesting and might want to check it out live or even pay for it. Imagiro is primarily a live act and our primary business model, if you will, is to play concerts and sell our cds and T-shirts as a supplement.
Lastly, and more idealistically, it’s question on creating an example. Someone has to undertake the experiments to see how it’s possible to do music business in a post-scarcity gift-economy and it’s obvious that the incumbent industry isn’t driving the innovation in this field. It’s almost guaranteed that new ideas won’t come from old institutions and we are more interested in creating something new than preserving the old.
You can download What to Do and How to Do It in mp3 format in one zip-file or download individual tracks in mp3, ogg, and flac formats, all hosted by the Internet Archive. Furthermore, the whole album is available in flac format as a bittorrent by way of LegalTorrents. In return please consider donating whatever amount you like using your PayPal account or credit card by clicking this big friendly button:
Tags: bittorrent, creativecommons, flac, mp3, music, ogg
