#jamindo

I do a youtube series. I need music for my opening credits. Much as podcasters do when they’re looking for music for their podcasts, I go looking for podsafe music to use for my show - specifically music available under a Creative Commons Attribution License. I say that license because I’m not sure what the legalities are for me using your music under a non-commercial license - I’m not charging for the show, and I’m not asking people to not use ad-block, but I am accepting Patreon Donations and have a PayPal tip jar.

I’m considering changing my main title music - “Nazgul At Your Back, by Weirdland”. So, I’ve been going looking for sites that have Creative Commons licensed music. In the course of this - I’ve discovered some interesting stuff.

Soundcloud has a wide variety of music from a variety of artists. It’s probably the best place to go if you’re looking for music from independent or unsigned artists, and there is a wide variety of creative commons licensed music on there. However, I can’t just search for creative commons music.

The way the site is set up, you have a series of checkboxes you can set when you upload a track to state what license the music is available under (Commercial, Creative Commons - and the various flavors of Creative Commons, Public Domain, etc.). So, all of this information is already in the Soundcloud database, in the record for this track, which means you’ve already indexed it. So, all you need to do, is provide a bit of an advanced search option, to let me look for, for example, all Metal tracks where Creative Commons = Yes.

However, I can’t do that.

I also can’t do that at Bandcamp and Jamindo. All of these sites, I should mention, are listed on CreativeCommons.org as sites you can and should go to in order to find Creative Commons licensed music. 

However, these sites also have artists who have uploaded non-creative commons licensed music. So, if I can’t do that little, basic search to let me tell what music is creative commons and what isn’t, the utility of these sites has decreased dramatically.

There’s also Magnatune, but Magnatune has an additional problem of charging a $299 licensing fee to download music from the site, if it’s creative commons licensed or not. Putting aside whether or not that fits the spirit or letter of the Creative Commons license, if I had that kind of scratch, I’d just license “Masters of the Universe” by Hawkwind - my original opening credits theme from back when I was on Blip, in the first place. Combine that with also having a search that doesn’t allow me to focus on Creative Commons license tracked, and you have a site that is 100% useless for podcasters or youtube video producers. So, Magnatune can double-dog fuck off.