iPodarmy

One of the most frustrating things about finding music (or any other content) to share is trying to understand all the licensing aspects and what’s ok to share and what isn’t.

Creative Commons was created in essence to make this a whole lot easier. When you do find some music you like that’s been licensed under a CC license, it’s pretty easy to tell whether or not you can use if for a podcast or what-have-you. The problem is, there are tons of artists out there that would be perfect for CC licensing that have no clue it ever exists.

This was my biggest hurdle in picking music for my podcast. I started out wanting to do a CC only podcast, but quickly realized many of the artist I wanted to play, while being open to sharing, just hadn’t heard of CC licensing. This isn’t a big surprise if you really think about it. Musicians are busy creating music and probably simply have visibility to geeky stuff like that. Maybe that’s why most of the CC licensed music you’ll find out there is of the electronic variety.

Over at the CC Wiki there is an initiative going to help come up with some ideas to get the word out and let people know about the benefits and opportunities that CC licensing can bring to artists. There is one such idea going on here in Seattle, and I was lucky enough to help this one along.

I hooked Matt May up with some friends of mine why are pretty heavily involved with Laptopbattle.org. For those of you who might not know what a laptop battle is, it’s kind of like a DJ Battle, but with laptops. It’s done mostly with samples and loops. It’s a ton of fun to watch and it takes quite a bit of creativity, talent and know-how to do well. The winner of the first one I went to won with a set done almost entirely with Star Wars samples—it was killer.

In any-case, it’s also a great opportunity, and great fit, for Creative Commons. We need more ways to help let artists know about CC licensing. I know it’d help me in my search to find good music to share with y’all.