Posted on July 4, 2008 - by jono

Severed Fifth Updates

Just wanted to give a quick update on Severed Fifth and some of the work going on in the project:

• Recording is going well. The vast majority of the music is tracked, I just need to finish up vocals. Go and see studio reports 1 2 and 3 for more details. I think things are sounding pretty damn meaty right now. I can’t wait to get it out there.
• I am about to start a travelling spree for a five weeks, in which I will not be able to record vocals. As such, I plan on releasing a bunch of sneak peaks of the songs each week to show you how things are sounding.
• The Severed Fifth Street Team has kicked off, and it is great to see some representation across the world. I am excited to see how we can take the Open Source methodology and apply it to music. We have some great people on board, and I can’t wait to see what is possible. Come and join up the street team help make the new music economy happen.
• After a significant amount of time thinking about licensing, I have decided on a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license for my music. This license satisfies a bunch of the things that are important to me. I am happy for people to share the music, remix it and play with it as much as they like both commercially and non-commercially, but I felt uncomfortable with people selling the music as-is, even with attribution. The reason for this is that Severed Fifth is there to explore different methods of generating revenue, and I feel it is reasonable for an artist to have sole rights to sell their music commercially. However, I did not want to prohibit other artists taking my music, mashing it up and selling their work. This license strikes that balance perfectly.
• Speaking of licensing, I have written up the Severed Fifth Licensing Page. With the page I did not just want to make it a boring page full of legal terms – I wanted it to be a page that gives useful information about what people can actually do with the content. I would love any feedback from you about how to make the page not only useful for explaining rights and restrictions, but also inspiring people to use the content in interesting ways.

Finally, I had my first piece of Severed Fifth Merchandise come through. I ordered some high quality gloss stickers which I plan on selling on the store, but will also bring along to conferences to give some out. If you are at LugRadio Live UK 2008, GUADEC, OSCON or DebConf come and ask for one. They look like this:

Rock and roll.