Jack Black has pretty much summed it up nicely here, but we should go over this some more.

Here are some things that are NOT OK to upload to Splice, almost always:

• Music from most CDs
• Music you found on Limewire or other file sharing sites
• Most rap a cappellas
• Covers of someone else’s music, even if you played them yourself
• Clips from movies
• Samples from anything listed above

This might seem like it’s kind of limiting, but that’s only until you start to discover how many amazing things are already out there that are ok to use. There are a lot of musicians who like to share their music for remixing. A good place to find them is through the search engine on the Creative Commons website.

But better yet, why not upload something you made all by yourself? You can upload:

• your own song or riff
• yourself reading some original poetry
• your audio diary
• your own podcast!
• your cat purring
• your impromptu breakfast drum session with your fork banging on your coffee mug

Or anything else you can think to put a microphone in front of that’s happening right in front of you. Get creative!

The best thing you can do if you want to hear music from your favorite band’s new CD on Splice is to contact your favorite band and let them know. A lot of artists are starting to allow this kind of remixing, but only when they know their fans really want to join in. Get involved! Just remember that uploading copyrighted works is bad for everyone. It takes a lot of time for the staff here to delete them, and they plug up the works by wasting space and making it really hard for people who want to CREATE music to find legal sounds.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 5:28 am and is filed under Culture, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.