Journal: News & Comment

Business Jive music coming

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Recently I noted that I've been commissioned to write theme music for the Business Jive podcast run by Judd Bagley. It's now finished, and Judd is likely to use it for the first time for his Wednesday, November 23 show. At that point I'll also release it on my own Penmachine Podcast so you can listen to it.

The whole experience has been a great one. Judd already liked my music and had used other tunes of mine (as I encourage people to do) in his show. He phoned me with the idea of paying me to custom-compose and record new theme music for him. By email, he described what kind of vibe he wanted and what sort of parts he needed for different components of his podcast. He paid me a deposit and I started to work. Over the course of the next ten days, I sent him a sample backing track, then a draft mix. He asked for one small tweak, and then approved a final mix yesterday.

I had Les Thorn master the final recording, and then sent both uncompressed AIFF and compressed MP3 versions to Judd this evening, to which he replied, "I'm near giddy about this." We're both happy.

We plan to release the tune—called "Can You Dig It? (Business Jive Podcast Theme)"—under the Creative Commons Music Sharing 2.0 license. That means you can share, copy, or distribute it, and podcasters other than Judd can play it on their shows if they give credit—but they can't use it as theme or background music, modify or creative derivatives of it, or make money from it. Judd has exclusive commercial and derivative rights to the track.

Judd and I think the CC Music Sharing license a good balance to let people share and distribute the music, but to keep it exclusive as Judd's theme song.

And incidentally, Grammy-nominated flamenco-inspired guitarist Ottmar Liebert has licensed some of his material under the CC Sampling Plus license, which lets you sample, mash up, and remix it. He even has some loops and other stripped down parts you can use. They cost $1 to download, but then you can remix away. That's pretty cool for a relatively major artist.

Further, how about the free music available from Ottmar and others as a podcast XML feed for you to subscribe to? Wow.

Here's what that could mean: I could collaborate with Ottmar Liebert without having to ask him, by sampling the music he has released that way, and I could even conceivably make money from that collaboration. This is the future of music, I think.

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