Future Projects

Open Music Archive presents Free Songs

Proposal for EASTinternational 2006

Artists Eileen Simpson & Ben White have recently initiated the Open Music Archive project to source and distribute music that has fallen out of copyright. The Open Music Archive situates itself within the current discourse surrounding notions of authorship, ownership and distribution, reanimated by a porting of Free/Libre and Open Source software models to wider creative contexts.

Property rights are founded on a principle of limitation and because copyright removes works from the public domain, they deny the legal possibility of free creative use by others. The Open Music Archive concerns itself with the public domain and creative works that are not owned by any one individual and held in common by society as a whole. We have painstakingly tracked down original 78rpm recordings, digitised them, and placed them in a web-based archive. The full tracks are available as source recordings for use and re-use as material for future creative exchanges and is a vehicle for collaborations and distributed projects.

For EAST international2006, we propose to continue to reanimate the archive by inviting bands to respond to source recordings by performing cover versions of songs at the opening event. The bands will select from a compilation of twenty source tracks from the Open Music Archive; mostly 1920s recordings of jazz, blues, and country songs (examples are included) The cover versions will be recorded and Creative Commons ShareAlike licences will be used to license the ‘new’ recordings so that their constituent parts become, in perpetuity, a legally protected creative resource.

In the gallery space, two listening posts will be installed: one playing the source tracks from the archive, the other playing the new cover versions recorded at the opening event. The archive research will be exposed on a wall pasted with biographical details, pictures and listings related to the lives and deaths of the various songwriters.

Background

From early in the 20th Century it was common practice among record labels to have singers or musicians "cover" a record that was a significant commercial hit. They would then release the song on their own label in hopes of cashing in on the tune's success. Today, covers continue to win audiences who like to hear a familiar song. New artists are often introduced to the record buying public with performances of well-known, "safe" songs; the chance of commercial success can be increased and credibility gained by using a proven hit. Popular tunes are relentlessly revamped by boy bands, a Stars in their Eyes contender, or Brenda from X-Factor.

Through our project, the commercial device of the cover version is negated; the tracks are unlikely to be familiar to the audience and they don’t generate money through royalties because their property rights have expired.

‘Open Music Archive presents Free Songs’ seeks to deconstruct the cover version, disrupt authority in the archive, and deny the legal and commercial structures of the music industry. We aim to enrich rather than deplete the public domain and reclaim what is public in an age of relentless privatization.