Basically - it's an online library of music that is both free-as-in-"free speech" and free-as-in-"free beer".
Just at the moment we're a bit light on content, but in time we will offer high-quality recordings of all of the world's out-of-copyright music. Songseed does not want to limit itself to a genre but the focus in these early stages is on collecting what most people term 'classical' music.
If you're a performance-oriented artist then this system will be an elegant way for you to reach a global audience. If you're a music listener then it allows you to get hold of liberally-licensed music either free or for the cost of the bandwidth plus margin.
Generally - if you're the sort of person who loves traditional music - then we want to do everything within our power to make you love us.
To win the hearts and dollars of traditional music lovers by creating an online library of liberally-licensed recordings and supplying that and related services to artists and to the public at low cost.
A passion for music and for smart economics. Most music artists participate in music for the love of it and fund themselves by having people turn up to their gigs. There is also a recording music industry and the middlemen involved with this are notorious for exploiting artists. We aim to cut out the middleman.
The traditional model of copyright is rapidly breaking down. While many people continue to defend the idea of copyright in the public sphere, the actions of consumers indicate a widespread, rational and almost total dissatisfaction with that regime.
There is demand for an online music library which distributes music without placing unreasonable demands on consumers. We don't attempt to sell content but might charge a fee to let you access it at times (particularly through mechanisms that involve bandwidth costs).
Our motivation in building this system are:
This business model we have planned is similar in principle to that which is used by companies that distribute free software like GNU/Linux.
This is a weird question to answer because it relies on a bad assumption - usually that the major reason that people are involved with music is to create and sell recordings. That's madness. Regardless - people ask this a lot so here's a response.
Most artists are performance-oriented. They either don't care about money in the context of their music, or else they fund their operation by getting people to come along to their performances.
Through songseed it is possible for up artists to get an edge that wasn't previously available because their works become instantly available to a worldwide audience. There will also be a sense of community and history to the system. The model is completely respectable.
We're confident that a business of this mould of inevitable. We're consistent with copyright, but we don't leverage it. There's no payola to compete with. You're not playing that stupid game of trying to tell gans what to do with bits and bytes that live on their own hardware. It's accessible, it's honest, it's easy.
Right now you just go to the front page and type in the name of the work you're interested in and it will give you a list of matching results. At the moment the archive is very small so there are some notes on the front page to draw attention to the content we do have.
At the moment you can just download it directly. This probably won't stay in its current form forever: if we're as successful as we'd like to be then that's going to get expensive quickly. But we're working on several models that will allow us to cover costs as the user base increases while still allowing access to a lot of free content. BitTorrent is a strategy we're likely to focus on.
It varies based on the place of the performer(s) and that of the composer. A quick and conservative rule of thumb is that if the work was released before the artist died and they died before 1956 then it is out of copyright. Otherwise it will probably be covered by copyright for some time yet - the change is down to copyright extensions made in many countries in recent years.
An enormous amount of fantastic content was around before 1956 (ockeghem.. palestrina.. monteverdi.. dowland.. bach.. handel..), so if you are or represent the performer for a rendition of a work by a composer of the romantic period or earlier you're almost certain to be able to release it.
It's pretty easy. We've found that a really solid application for this on Mac OS X is Audio Hijack and there is a more advanced version of it called Audio Hijack Pro. You will certainly be able to find similar products for other platforms via an internet search. We'd like to hear from people who are particularly happy with other setups.
At the moment we have a very basic upload mechanism which you can access at the upload page.
Right now the mechanism is dead-simple, and expanding this is one of our focus points. If you have particular ideas or needs for this area then we'd appreciate it if you would use our feedback page to send.
We are also quite happy to accept physical delivery of media to save you having to upload tracks individually. If you are in this situation please contact us so we can coordinate the track details and copyright release with you.
One of our priorities is to improve the system that artists have available to get their music into our system. Still - we didn't want to delay the launch building elaborate systems.
We'll keep some form of "mail us your disks" system around even once we've introduced the direct-upload mechanism. A wise friend once said, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon packed with hard disks".
If anyone has a huge collection of LPs containing recordings that are out of copyright music and would like us to put in the archive please get in touch and we'll work something out for shipping.
Probably. If you have needs in this direction please get in contact with us so that we can discuss your requirements.
This project is being coordinated by Craig Turner, a bass-baritone choral junkie with a working background in online-applications, foreign exchange banking, software project management, system administration, compositing tools, arts administration and a bunch of other things besides. He is currently working on a foreign exchange messaging platform called TradeSTP at Logicscope Ltd.