Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

In preparation for LCA 2008 and the possibility for mixing at the party on Friday night, I looked at my Creative Commons music collection. I'd already bought pretty much all of the music on Magnatunes, and my previous encounter with Jamendo left me thinking it would take ages to trawl through to find the good stuff amongst the dross. But the paucity of tracks I had made making a coherent, melodic and thematically consistent mix difficult. I had to stick my head back under the waterfall again.

Fortunately, by chance this time when I went to Jamendo I noticed the "Browse by Popularity" feature, and suddenly it clicked. Of course! Jamendo is a "web 2.0" site, so it encourages listeners to rate the music and compiles those statistics. A further hint that I was on the right track was that Atomic Cat, which I'd previously identified as great stuff, was up there in the top three. I started downloading what turned out to be 3.52GB of music, and a sampling so far shows that all of it is pretty good quality. At last I feel a bit more comfortable about doing some CC mixing!

Now to go through and work out which have a 'no-derivs' license and try to email them asking if a mix for which they get credit and which will meet all the other terms of their license is OK, so that I can actually publish the thing according to the terms of the license. I don't know what these people were thinking but it was apparently along the lines of "let's make music of a form commonly mixed by DJs and then deny any DJ, even one that uses CC licenses, the chance to use our music."