Monday, October 7, 2024

Releasing a Music Track & Stems under CREATIVE COMMONS Attribution-Share Alike License

Did that yesterday for my DIGITAL DUST EXTENDED track on Bandcamp.


I output the stems from my project, added a text file with the license info, as below, zipped that directory up, put on google drive, and made a shareable link.

To try and advertise it is free to remix, also made this YouTube SHORT:


Hello There!

I have licensed these DIGITAL DUST EXTENDED Stem files as 
CREATIVE COMMONS Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Adrian Bruce (Megacurve  Kyoto, Japan)   October 6 2024.
https://www.artandtechnology.com.au/

You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

So why would I do that? 

"Digital Dust" was an expression I heard Rick Beato use to describe unreleased Music Projects sitting unused on Hard Drives.  I think it also applies to most personnel projects uploaded to Streaming sites and Bandcamp from people without any kind of following, such as myself.


The more common use of "Digital Dust" is it encompasses the residual data created through our daily interactions with technology. 

The most popular of my tracks I have put on Bandcamp have had, may be, 12 plays, and most of those haven't been played till the end. So the reality is my tracks on BandCamp are mostly just Digital Dust sitting on hard drives.  

Doesn't mean the tracks are bad, just the few acquaintances who bother to listen to something this guy they know made, don't care. 

They aren't followers for my music, but may follow me as  I designed a famous music production system in the 1980s, or I now live in Kyoto Japan, or they read the Science Fiction Desktop Production articles I wrote and the cool models I made in the 1990s in a UK magazine, or they appreciate the car caricatures or the comics I make.

The Digital Dust 59 second version was done for a music+comic YouTube Short, and that did all I intended it to. It had some 52 views, which is a massive hit for me 😀


So releasing the extended version under the creative commons license is an experiment to see if anything else interesting comes of it.  I expect that little will, as anyone after something like that to work on will not come across it, for the same reasons the original track do not get played.  

If someone was to make any real money from a derived work, good on them! That requires networking and marketing skills I don't have for music. Social Media, and the way people use it, the rage, the hate, but just as much, the utter popularity of utter waste of time nothingness trivia ( my kid sneezed, I like clouds, or I like my toast this brown) makes me ill. The only post type I can do that gets noticed at all is this 😣

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology


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