I want to start releasing my own music and have no interest in the corporate streaming platforms. I have only a basic conceptual understanding of torrenting but it seems to me like a nice way of sharing my music with people directly.
What do I need to do and consider in order to make a music release freely available in this way?
Currently my knowledge and experience is limited to using an application on my computer to search for and download files from others but I’m willing to learn.
Any advice or signposting much appreciated :)
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/
Read that for a start. And maybe consider sharing your work under a nice license. You can also check out platforms like Jamendo, Bandcamp, the Internet Archive… And as far as I understand archive.org will even handle generating some torrents for you.
+1 for Jamendo and CC licenses
What are your thoughts on Jamendo from an artists point of view?
I can’t speak as an artist as I ain’t one, but as someone who loves listening and discovering new music, Jamendo is great. There are many artists I listen daily that I only know because of it.
https://artists.jamendo.com/introduction-en/
Not big on them saying they can take from people who may be your fans for you lol
They’ll “hunt” em down for me! Love to know:)
Wouldn’t that depend on the license you choose? If it doesn’t include the Non Commercial clause then there’s no reason to hunt anything. Plus from what I see it’s an opt in thing.
Thanks for those links :)
Yes, I’ve been looking at licensing today too. I think I will use the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. If I’m correct this would allow free sharing between listeners and adaptation for creative use with attribution, while preserving my ability to charge for commercial use.
These restrictions are meant to forbid what other people can do. So you yourself can do anything with your content, no matter what’s in the license. It just means other people can’t use it in their projects if relates to making money. But I think something like CC BY-SA or BY-NC-SA is a solid choice. I’m always for freedom, so I’d drop the NC and allow my audience to do practically whatever they want… But it’s your creation and your choice.
I commend your generosity! I would like my music to be as free as possible but to retain some control over who gets to make money from it and how. If another poor artist wanted to use something in a sample or piece of video or performance art I’d be inclined to let them use it for free or cheap but if a powerful and exploitative company wanted to use it I would want to extract a price from them or deny it’s use if I didn’t like what they did.