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Finally, there is free and legal music online
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As soon as grandmothers and 13-year-olds started being sued by music industry leviathans for enormous sums of money, downloading music lost some of its excitement. David Sample and Steve Eaton have found a free and legal way to assist musicians and lovers of music alike.
Their solution is providing freeandlegalmusic.com, a Web site where artists upload their music making it legal and free for anyone searching out new music.
Though songs are accepted and shared based on the honor system, artists retain their rights to the music which is not to be used for commercial purposes. The Web site is set up to benefit musicians by providing exposure while music connoisseurs are given access to new artists without the fear of legal retribution.
Sample has a vision of where Free and Legal is headed. Current technology has helped to break down past barriers such as limited radio space and record labels that worry more about business rather than music.
With the Internet and its vast resources, Sample sees Free and Legal taking off and branching out into promotion and distribution as well as other forms of media such as books. “We think people are hungry for it” says Sample. Other than the Web site, Sample and a handful of others are promoting Free and Legal primarily by word of mouth.
Currently there are 44 songs available on the site which launched Independence Day 2005. The site lists 18 genres of music and has songs available in 10 of them.
Nearly half of the music files offered are under the genre of ‘inspirational.’ Sample, who has two songs on hand, maintains that the site will not turn away any musicians as long as the music is “good in intent, content, and quality.” He also suggests that this definition is very broad. If a song does not meet this definition, artists are opened up to a community of musicians willing to help rather than turning the artist away.
Enter Steve Eaton. Eaton has been a songwriter and musician for over thirty years. He has had songs recorded by such artists as The Carpenters, The Righteous Brothers, Art Garfunkel and Glen Campbell. His goal as an experienced musician is to help musicians make good music. Good music means it is well-crafted, performed, and written.
Another project of Eaton’s is Do Good Music (dogoodmusic.com). Along with Eaton, a handful of musicians of various backgrounds have created the Web site to create a music community.
Their mission as posted on the site reads “to ‘do good’ through words and music, to enable and encourage others to do the same, and to make good music available to the world.”
“People need permission to try new things,” said Sample. “Corporations are stifling creativity, there is a world of suppressed talent.” Sample and Eaton hope to provide an outlet for such artists. In fact, they are optimistic that they can assist musicians to make a living rather than a hobby out of music.
The goal of these two projects is not to create stars or crank out hits. Instead they want to help develop artists that would not normally pass through record label image-filters.
Free and Legal Music is meant not to produce prefabricated music, but to provide listeners with options other than radio-friendly rehashes.
Ryan Gorringe
Culture Writer