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Fun Stuff => BAND => Topic started by: Sox on 22 Jan 2010, 18:53
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Hey, Listen!
My cheap boss won't pay for a PRS license so I'm looking for a wide variety of free royalty free music to make some playlists for the shop. I'm sure a few of you reading this have some recommendations, suggestions and advice, and maybe even a few recordings of your own kicking around that you'd be okay with me playing at work.
We really need music in the shop, at the moment we have the option of golden silence or a TV that plays mostly static.
Help me out?
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You could use spotify? Or do you need a license to play that in public spaces?
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The PRS are a royalty collection agency for musicians. If you play music publically, they collect the royalties on behalf of the musician. Sounds awesome, right?
You need to purchase a license from them to play any copyrighted music in a public space. They're rather indiscriminate...
Following a furore in the media, the PRS apologised in October 2009 to 'singing granny' Sandra Burt, a 56-year-old shelf-stacker at a village in Clackmannanshire for heavy-handedly persuing her for singing to herself while stacking shelves. She was initially told that she would be prosecuted and fined thousands of pounds. However, they subsequently acknowledged their mistake with a bunch of flowers.
Yes. These guys threatened prosecute and fine a 56 year old woman because she was singing copyrighted songs to herself while stacking shelves in a supermarket.
Turns out, they're not so hot. A huge amount of musicians hate them too.
What I'm looking for is music/muzak that is not covered by the PRS. I would like to try and maintain some standards however. Easy as it'd be to get some elevator muzak playing in the shop, I don't think I could listen to it for several hours a day, every day.
See?
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Yeah, you really don't want to try slipping by them. God knows how, but they always seem to find out about everything.
The only stuff I have that I know to be totally royalty-free is my old hardcore band, but that's not going to be appropriate for a shop. I'll ask if any of the more palatable bands I know aren't signed up with PRS though.
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It's a slow solution, but I'm recording my own music too! And those money grubbing whores won't be seeing a penny.
Me neither, but that's not the point...
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I could go with the above poster and just hook you up with my album that I just finished:
http://www.mediafire.com/?n2jlvgwwhnu
And this is a pretty poor live recording of my friend's band:
http://www.mediafire.com/?5zvyhd5jh5l
I'll try to upload some more music that various friends have recorded. I actually have one thing that would be perfect, give me a little bit to upload (slow connection rate)
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Moondog is royalty-less, I think
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What country is this? I've blasted my iPod through pretty much every job I've had in the last 5 years.
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Considering that they fine in 'pounds' I'm gonna go with Ethiopia
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This was the great thing about working in a store that sold music (bookstore with CD dept) was that overhead music counted as product promotion so we didn't have to worry about this shit.
Have you thought about approaching local bands for some tracks?
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http://www.jamendo.com/en/
Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses.
Share your music, download your favorite artists!
The little sidebar says "29658 albums to be discovered" so you kinda have a selection.
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Most of it's probably crap though.
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In fact forget I said anything.
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http://creativecommons.org/audio/ has some more CC licensed tracks.
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Creative Commons usually restricts commercial use, you'd have to find tracks that have attribution only licenses that allow commercial use and then insure that tracks are attributed when played. Probably would sidestep the PRS problem though.
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NEGATIVLAND
edit: also Silver Mt. Zion do not copyright their music. not sure about other Constellation bands.
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You're allowed to use Urban Planning Records bands, except recent signees Ink Road.
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Chumbawamba!
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Rack and Ruin Records (http://www.rackandruinrecords.com/index.php)
not sure about the specifics of the laws or anything, so this might not work, but they give their music out for free on the internet so they probably aren't copyrighted or anything.
I recommend Jason The Swamp.
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Giving out your music free on the internet doesn't mean it isn't protected, especially from a third party using it for commercial gain. This shit is complicated, so unless you're 100% certain, it's best to not take your chances. Even my boss doesn't have the faintest idea about how any of this works, he just knows he needs a license to play the radio. He honestly believes that he can get around it by playing music from DVDs on the television instead.
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Giving out your music free on the internet doesn't mean it isn't protected, especially from a third party using it for commercial gain.
Negativland have hundreds of hours of entertaining radio show, in addition to their albums.
http://matrix.csustan.edu/Negativ/
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Giving out your music free on the internet doesn't mean it isn't protected, especially from a third party using it for commercial gain.
Yeah, I figured as much but I don't know jack about laws so I figured you could check the website out and see if it will work.
I found this which may or may not mean anything:
All works presented on this site (audio, video, graphic and text) are licensed under an Attribution-Noncommecial-NoDeriv3.0 Creative Commons License. (unless stated otherwise
I don't know what that means but it says "noncommercial" so I'm guessing...it won't work?
also what kind of country do you live in where somebody actually goes around and makes sure you have a license to play your music? Pretty sure they won't be busting down your door any time soon if you just play whatever.
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Those are the chances you take. It doesn't happen everyday, but if you keep it up long enough, it does happen eventually.
Plus, if we decide to chance it and just play anything at all in the shop, then the other staff will pick the songs and frankly, they all have rubbish tastes. This way, I get control.
I absolutely refuse to listen to music chosen by fans of say, Fallout Boy, or people who think that Metallica's version of Whiskey In a Jar is superior to the original.
In the meantime, I am playing various radio podcasts without music.
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A little while after the small social centre I volunteer at occasionally opened we got a letter from PRS telling us we had to pay them to use music. If I remember right, this was well before the fire department noticed we were completely not in compliance with fire safety regulations, or the council spotted that we had live music without an entertainment licence.
So yeah, they are surprisingly good at finding out about infringement.
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or people who think that Metallica's version of Whiskey In a Jar is superior to the original.
Which original?
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I assume he means the Thin Lizzy version, since that is what Metallica's essentially aped.
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Which original?
The Dubliners. Which I guess is far from being the original, but superior by virtue of still being a recognisably Irish and folk. That's the version I grew up with through exposure to Irish relatives at family gatherings. I didn't hear the Thin Lizzy version until my early teens, and it blew my mind.
Thanks to Metallica there are kids who aren't even aware of either the Thin Lizzy adaptation, or it's origins.
That version is just horrible and Metallica have been nothing more than an insult to anybody with ears for the best part of almost a decade now.
Did I mention "fuck metallica"?
Fuck Metallica.
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Who covers a twists cover, come on.
Edit: I just checked Wikipedia:
U2, Pulp, Smokie, Metallica, Belle and Sebastian and Simple Minds.
I had NO idea.
And also the Dubliners were like, the eighth guys to record it as a single.
I had NO idea.
I guess I'm the ignorant one!
Egg on my face.
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Oh, thanks for all the suggestions so far, guys. Huge help.
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I thought it was just kind of funny to hear a folk song referred to as having an "original".
By folk I mean traditional folk, not modern but folk-styled, like Peter, Paul, and Mary or Ensiferum.
And yes, I did mostly make that example just so I could use those two bands in the same sentence.