Free! Music! Contest 2010

To promote Creative Commons licensed music and the musicians behind it, Musikpiraten e.V. launches this year once again the Free! Music! Contest.

Until the end of July, musicians and bands who are releasing their music under a Creative Commons license, can register for the contest. Until August 22th there will be an additional remix-phase: the participating artists are invited to submit single stems or acapellas in addition to the individual songs. By submitting individual tracks or the submission of music videos, the chance to be added onto the sampler that will be a result of the contest, will be increased - if only just a little bit.

German edition of this text can be found here

Foto: Jonathan Worth (CC-BY-SA)

The well known Creative Commons author Cory Doctorow has become the Free! Music! Contest's patron. Cory is Co-Editor of the notable blog Boing Boing and has contributed articles for The Guardian, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired and many other newspapers, magazines and blogs. His most famous book Little Brother was 2008 on position 8 of the New York Times beststeller list.

I really like the Free! Music! Contest. Promoting Creative Commons content this way is a very good idea!
Cory Doctorow

A panel of music bloggers, artists and netlabel enthusiasts then decides who will be promoted on the Free! Music! Sampler 2010. It will be made available as a free download and also be pressed on CD. The highlight of the Free! Music! Contest will be on October second: a party at the Wiesbaden Kreativfabrik.

How to register?

Please read this carefully, otherwise your registration might not be working! Right now
(July 16th) we have a fantastical number of 108 submissions from 29 countries! We are really happy to have such a phenomal results and appreciate your engagement. Thanks for sharing your music!

But (there is always a "but") it seems our instructions have not been
clear enough. And due to that large number of competitors,we need your help.

Please ensure that
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* You have uploaded your song at http://soundcloud.com/musikpirat/dropbox (They are having some troubles these days, but they are hopefully soon up and running again). If you already have a soundcloud account, just share your track with "musikpirat"

* You have uploaded the same track, you registered

* The download option is enabled

* The song is either flac or wav/aiff. We prefere flac, but can live with wav/aiff. Please do not upload mp3. We will publish the sampler as ogg (and _maybe_ mp3), and transcoding lossly compressed data is not very smart.

* If you want to compete with a video, the video also has to be cc licensed. Otherwise we cannot use - and count - it.

* If you want to compete with a video, post a url where we can download it directly (http://rapidshare.com might be a place where you can upload it). YouTube, Vimeo and such are no good idea to download videos from. You can see what happens during transcoding here. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAvCNNjRhZ4

Stems/Acapellas
===============

Please think again if you can submit stems/acapellas to http://ccmixter.org. Vocals and melody parts are very appreciated there. It is also a very good source for every remixer and sampling artist!

Do not upload to much stuff there - uploading every track of your song reduced the chance to get remixed signifantly, since it takes away a lot of creative space the artists there need. :)

Sponsors

In addition to artists, we are also looking for sponsors. If you are interested in getting involved monetarily or with a prize, all the necessary information can be found at here.

Of course we are also glad, if you klick our Flattr-Button:

The contests logo is available in three different colors: