Can There Be Open Source Music? 183
Lemeowski writes "Cygnus Solutions co-founder Michael Tiemann takes an in-depth look at whether music can truly ever be open source. Leaning on his personal experiences of trying to convince the market that a company that provided commercial support for free software could be successful, Tiemann argues that similar to how 'the future of software was actually waiting for the fuller participation of users ... so, too, is the future of the art of music.' In his essay, Tiemann makes a case for open source music, from licensing for quality recordings to sheet music with notes from the original composer in an easy-to-reuse format, and he offers ways to get involved in making music open source."
Apropos open source music, reader rDouglass adds a link to the Open Goldberg Variations project, last mentioned on Slashdot in 2012.
Re:Of course there can. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's also called "the public domain". There's a reason we end up with so many forks of different traditional songs, and it's because people weren't subject to repercussions for simply playing music.
It's Creative Commons, and it's commonplace. (Score:2, Interesting)
Creative Commons is functionally similar to Open Source in every respect.
My own music, poor and sickly as it is, is available for anyone to use, perform, re-arrange, or modify. I require no payment and grant blanket permission IF you give attribution, are using it non-commercially, and license derivative works in like manner. If you want to use it commercially or change the license terms, etc, then I do require you to ask permission. That's reasonable... I think if you want to treat your contribution in a traditional manner, then you should have to abide by those rules yourself. But CC licenses are varied, and may waive terms like reciprocity, making them more like a BSD license. Some might waive a non-commercial clause, making it more like the GPL.
A lot of vastly better artists than me (like Jonathan Coulton) also license some or all of their work under Creative Commons. Some gifted amateurs get together and hold competitions in which they share and build on each others' work... like SpinTunes, or "Frankensong" events. You'll find many of them on Bandcamp.com, where you can often set your own price for music.
These days I'll buy from independent artists FAR more frequently than from "the labels". I like the Creative Commons, and support it financially.
I've had a lot of discussions about this, actually (Score:4, Interesting)
I run OpenGameArt.org, and we host a lot of creative commons licensed music. This is a topic that comes up fairly frequently, and the answer short answer is that, yes, music can be open source. The long answer is of course a bit more complicated than that.
For something to be "open source", this means that you need some sort of preferred source format that's easy to modify. In the case of people composing sheet music, that answer is easy. You provide the sheet music, or some open file type that saves note information (generally a midi file). There are a couple of cases where it's a lot more complicated.
Improvised music
What is the preferred, easy to modify source format for improvisation? The only possible answer is a recording, but recordings are *not* easy to modify in ways that are musically meaningful and still maintain the integrity of the original recording. Of course, this is Slashdot, so some pedant will of course point out that you can get a wav editor and lengthen and change the pitch of notes yourself, but this requires a lot of effort to make it sound good, and if the recording is of multiple notes being played at once, you're essentially out of luck unless you happen to have access to some very expensive, closed-source software, and even then, the results aren't going to be perfect. We could simply stop accepting recordings and start insisting on sheet music, but the only thing that really does is close out submissions of improvised music -- it doesn't increase the amount of "source" available. (Whereas, if you write a program, there's a very good chance that you have access to your source code.)
Musical Instruments
The other problem with a Midi file (and regular sheet music) is that, while it provides instructions for playing a piece of music, it doesn't give you a means of duplicating a performance exactly. For instance, if someone with thousands of dollars worth of proprietary audio software, sound samples, and production equipment produces a midi file of an orchestra, it's going to sounds pretty damn good. Give the sheet music to a conductor of an orchestra, and it's gong to sound amazing. Give the midi file to a random person with a computer and it's going to sound like it's being played on a gameboy. Point is, sheet music and midi files are not complete means of reproducing a performance exactly, whereas computer code is a complete way of reproducing a binary.
So yeah, shoehorning music into the "open source" mold isn't completely trivial, because music isn't completely analogous to software. On the other hand, the problems aren't so insurmountable that it would be impossible to consider certain music to be "open source", particularly if you loosen the definition a bit with respect to music and musical performances.