For those of you that are unaware, I thought i’d share some information in this blog about Creative Commons. Lawrence Lessig has been a driving force in creating a non-profit organisation with new, groundbreaking copyright rules, that aim to guide forward-thinking musicians and artists through a new digital age of arts.

Building upon existing laws, Creative Commons licenses adapts them to allow remixing, mashing, evolving and combining of existing works, which makes for a creative freedom that will surely help inspire many new artists; influence is a powerful motivator, and something that creative people love to share. The original artists are able to choose which rights they want to maintain, and which they can offer to allow experimentation and sharing for future works, the idea often being that no work is ‘finished’, and that by sharing and giving in this 2.0 world, exposure, discovery and accreditation are more important than direct revenue from one set product.

Lessig is not aiming for an out-of-control, misdirected world where no-one has any rights to any of their work, hence the Creative Commons tagline adapting ‘All rights reserved’ to ‘Some rights reserved’. His intention is to avoid the problems and boundaries created by current copyright laws, not to send the arts world into anarchy by declaring ‘No rights reserved’ on all works, something that major corporations and governing bodies are failing to understand, especially within the music industry.

There are four main parts of Creative Commons licenses, all available for free, can be combined together, and the Wikipedia page offers a good explanation;

* Attribution (by) requires users to attribute a work’s original author. All Creative Commons licenses contain this option, but some now-deprecated licenses did not contain this component.
* Authors can either not restrict modification, or use Share-alike (sa), which is a copyleft (a play on the word copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions) requirement – it requires that any derived works be licensed under the same license, or No derivatives (nd), which requires that the work not be modified..
* Non-commercial (nc) requires that the work not be used for commercial purposes.

As an example, Chicago-based record label Rock Proper have just released a new album under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, “making the experimental rock songs therein freely sharable/remixable as long as [the artist] is properly attributed and reuses are noncommercial in intent”.

I feel that this is important to share in this blog, and strongly suggest a bit of further reading from my links, as I believe that independent musicians can use the licenses to their advantage, and, through a good promotional idea and strategy, help raise awareness of the original, and ultimately the artist (/brand) behind that work. Putting creative freedom above trying to directly sell a product opens up other income streams such as touring, merchandise and more, and with the right online presence, you can really make this boost your music career.

Lee Jarvis.

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1) Update your Music Jobs profile! I can’t stress this enough. I see lots of profiles for people who sign up, no picture, no CV, and then sit back and wait. The industry doesn’t work like that, you have to show what you can do. That includes on your profile page; scores of companies view hundreds of pages every month (stats) – make yours one of them

2) Become ACTIVE in the social communities. They really are shaping the future on so many levels, from the way people share feedback on internet radio to Obama’s US election campaign. If you are potentially going to become one of my employees, I want to know that you are serious about the industry. One way I can see this is if you comment on the big music news; it shows that you are on the ball and that you are able to form an opinion. This is a whole new dimension to networking in person, and that has always been a key to the industry. Now, I’d honestly say that BOTH are of equal importance.

3) Start a blog. A blog should be seen as an extension of your resume. It can offer proof of your knowledge and insight, as well as a way to exercise your brain and keep you on top of your game, even if you only get 10 hits a day. This article should fully convince you, and also offers start-up tips, in the form of due diligence (not as scary as it sounds), finding your true voice and beginning in ‘stealth’ mode.

4) Keep your CV up to date. There are endless websites offering helpful tips, including how to make your CV a good, readable length, a smart and original layout and even helping to explain recent layoffs and career changes. Suck at spelling and grammar? Get a friend to check it over with you.

5) Internships. Yeah, I know, working for free sucks, and maybe it shouldn’t be allowed. But to be brutally honest, supply exceeds demand in the music industry, like many of the arts. Internships should not be seen as a step down, as they can open up so many new avenues and a whole new career opportunity. Even if they don’t lead directly to a new position, your CV will look so much stronger if you have got off your butt and worked one day a week at a radio station for a few months, then you spent 6 weeks helping out at a magazine. If you’ve not had anything music related since your education (or at all), you should really think again about internships.

6) Create your own work. There has never been a better time to go Indie, and you can apply that way of thinking to any aspect of the industry. Start that record label you and your buddies have always talked about. Invest in some equipment so you can hire yourself out as a Mobile DJ. Even write your own e-book. You will be surprised where it may take you, onto remix work for other labels? A regular gig at a guy’s bar (who’s brother’s wedding you performed at)? A publishing deal or magazine column? It may take a while, but you stand a far better chance if you are out there hustling away doing your own thing. Again, it’s proof that you are dedicated.

7) Go to events. Prepared. I’ll be honest (again!), this is something that I’m slacking at. I know it is important to get out there and meet new faces, check out new technologies, swap details and then follow up, but I have been a bit rubbish over the last couple of years. Being prepared simply means spending a reasonable amount of time and money on some good business cards/ CDs/ DVDs/ Press kits. I know it will greatly improve my media and marketing base if I get out to parties, conferences and exhibitions, and that is what I’m going to start doing. Join me.

So, there you have it. Of course I’m not saying this is definitive, and results may fluctuate with the weather, but I promise that these are fundamentals on your path to success.

Lee Jarvis.

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I recently decided to invest in a pair of Sennheiser HD595’s. Since then I have found myself increasingly inclined to reach for my headphones when producing rather than switching my monitors on. This is mainly due to the somewhat poorer quality of sound reproduction that my monitors provide. I then began thinking about the possible effects headphone monitoring (as opposed to using loudspeakers) may have on my music. I think A good place to start here would be with the Bass. Low frequency sound waves take up very large areas. For example; a 40 Hz sound has a wavelength of just over 8.5 metres (assuming oxygen is the medium). So lets take this into account when using a pair of headphones that have drivers located, lets say; 1cm away from the opening of the ear. The lack of space will result in loss of depth and clarity which ultimately results in your perception of the sound being altered (not what you want). Bass needs room to resonate in order to achieve its full potential and for this reason you will find that certain headphones have noticeably muddy sounding bottom ends. I generally find that DJ style cans are notoriously bad for this.

At this point I would like to mention that if you are thinking of buying a pair of headphones for production purposes then you should look into the differences between ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ headphones and each of their pros and cons.

The next area I would like to look at is to do with panning. The human hearing system is in stereo, meaning we use two ears to pin point the stereo location of any sound which we hear. There are two collaborative ways in which our ears do this; level difference (ILD/ Interaural Level Different) and timing difference (ITD/ Interaural Timing Difference). Level difference being to do with whether a sound is louder in one ear than the other and timing difference being based upon sounds reaching one ear before the other. Whenever we hear a sound in the natural world, our brain will assign a direction and distance from itself to the sound source based upon these two measurements.

Now lets apply this to monitoring…

When listening to a pair of loudspeakers we can hear sounds from the left speaker in both the left and the right ear (though they will be relatively quieter in the right). Likewise, we can also hear sounds from the right speaker in the left ear (again, relatively quieter). This is what gives us that stereo location. Now lets think about what happens when listening on a pair of headphones. We only receive sounds from the right channel in the right ear and sounds from the left channel in the left ear. This causes an exaggerated representation of the stereo image and can therefore result in your final mix lacking overall width.
I would also like to make a quick point about room ambience and of the course the lack of it inside a pair of headphones. If you are lucky enough to have a beautifully shaped/ sized room with excellent acoustics and a pair of studio monitors to match then great, but if like me, you don’t have that luxury then headphones may provide you with a safe haven from the standing waves and nasty sounding echoes that your room might produce. You will ultimately be left with an ambient blank canvas ready for you to add your own digital reverbs.

There are a range of different pros and cons when it comes to using headphones to produce/ mix. And because of this I would suggest using both. You should try switching from one to the other and then back again whilst working. Close comparison is the key to great mixing. Also, remember that a really good pair of headphones will set you back a lot less than a really good pair of monitors. This for me was a very important element in my choice to buy my HD595’s. And my very last piece of advice for today is to always listen to speakers/ headphones before you buy them. This may sound completely obvious to most of you but you would be surprised at how many people go and buy monitors that have been simply recommended to them or even worse just on the fact that they look good.

Thanks for reading.

Liam Adams

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Well, it’s always been on the cards, but the biggest news of the week is that Apple have finally been able to make iTunes tracks available without the Digital Rights Management that was essentially ‘watermarked’ into all previous tracks.

So you can now buy a tune from iTunes and play it on Microsoft’s Zune player or similar by SanDisk. It really took us until 2009 to get to that stage? The major labels and countless independents have been selling DRM-free tracks via Amazon for about a year, so why did they hold out on Apple?

Steve Jobs announced that EMI were willing to drop DRM back in 2007, but the rest of the majors (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment) have held out for some unknown reason. Actually, the reason is know; it’s because majors have no idea how to move forward in this music evolution. They were unwilling to hand over DRM-free copies to iTunes because of the scale of it’s sales, fearing a loss of control and rampant, escalating piracy. They struggle to keep hold of things like DRM so that people don’t ‘steal their money’.

Here’s a thought. Will Apple’s news make much difference? The people who already buy millions of tracks from iTunes are doing so (mostly) happily and playing them on their millions of iPods and iPhones. As far as they know (or care), DRM has never been an issue. People who have wanted to download DRM-free music for their non-Apple devices have been able to find it fairly easily. Will these settled buyers bother to jump ship? Especially with the new price rises too (more on that later). The infamous Bob Lefsetz thinks the news is very much a non-issue, saying that “the only people who care about DRM don’t pay for music, they just steal it. Otherwise, Amazon would have eclipsed Apple and the Seattle company would own the online music market”.

Is it all too-little, too-late?

Lee Jarvis.

Cross-posted at our Music Jobs website in the USA

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