I have been reading a very interesting book called “We think” by Charles Leadbeater . The thesis of his book is that there is great power in creativity and innovation when a whole bunch of people contribute to something creative WITHOUT any intention of making money out of it. The best example he gives in his book is Wikipedia where you have thousands of volunteers contributing to something for the love of it and for recognition from their peers…not for money. He even goes on to say that this type of creativity will be the driving force of the century. It is an interesting book and worth a read.

The book got me thinking about song writing. This is a one huge creative and innovative pursuit, isn’t it? Say we started a wiki were anybody could post song ideas, song titles, licks, melodies or even just one sentence. Anything. People could add and build and change and we could eventually end up with full songs. Of course we would probably end up with many songs that are not finished, (and who would be able to say when a song is finished?) BUT the idea is that whatever is posted here is not copyrightable. It is public domain. Anybody can take the ideas and record and sell them or perform them without paying any royalties. But, they cannot copyright anything about song. This would apply equally to people who contributed to the ideas and songs and to people who had no input whatsoever. ( I can use Wikipedia even though I have never contributed to it).

I would be interested in finding out if this PG Music community would be interested in starting something like this? I feel like we already have a great community that is ideal to plant the seed. (Of course it would not be restrictive in any way and anybody can participate or use the ideas, whether they are PG Music users or not). Let me know your thoughts…..

Hi Jo,

Interesting suggestion and concept.

I tend to agree with the premise that collaborative thinking can yield a result that is bigger than the sum of its parts. The fly in the ointment, from my perspective, is human nature.

Even though there are plenty of people who probably would contribute freely without expectation of gain, I think most people would tend to hold onto their good ideas.

However, nothing would please me more than to be proven wrong in this opinion.

I look forward to hearing other peoples thoughts. Good topic! Thanks for speaking up!

Joanne, I think a collaboration forum would be a great idea. Why not post it on the wish list thread? In fact collaborations are one of the things we do over at Kara-Moon.com. We have never had a problem over there so I will respectfully disagree with Mr. Marr. I hope this site doesn’t prove me wrong!

One must remember when going into a collaboration is that the work is not theirs. Keep that thought and all will go well.

The potential down side is the song may take a turn that you may not like. I just had an experience over at Kara-Moon where I add some parts to a finished song; of course I had the authors permission to do so. Upon hearing it he said that is something that he would never do. He continued by saying but that is the purpose of a collaboration, you get things you would never think of. He did say although it’s not in the direction he would have gone that it was a good addition to his song.

Thanks for commenting Pat and Mario. I think what I am proposing is slightly more radical. I am thinking that nobody owns the song. Even the person whose idea it originally was. So nobody can complain about a direction a song takes. They take it, leave it or change it. There would be no ownership of the songs or ideas.

Hi Joanne,

What an interesting topic!

What would you expect to happen if the song turned into a million dollar seller?

I remember reading an interview with Dolly Parton once where she said that a number 1 hit is worth around US$5,000,000. She was talking about "I Will Always Love You" and the fact that it's been number 1 on three separate occasions.

Also, I was at a Beth Nelson Chapman seminar a couple of years ago and she said that her one-third share of the writing royalties from "This Kiss" put her son through college.

What do you propose should happen in scenarios similar to the above? It's possible that something like the above could occur.

Regards,
Noel

Hi Noel.
What I am saying is that there would be no song writing royalties at all. So if a song turned into a big seller then the person who recorded/produced it gets everything. So in the case of "I will always love you" Whitney Houston and her producer would get everything from her version and Dolly Parton would get everything from her own (dolly's) version. Of course in the proposed scenario it would not have been Dolly's song to start out with. It would have been everybodies. Similar to "happy birthday to you".

Joanne, “Happy Birthday” is a copyrighted song: http://www.ip-watch.org/2013/07/04/happy-birthday-to-you-copyrighted/

So technically if you sing it the licensee should get compensated. However don’t worry. I doubt the music cops will go house to house to see if you are singing it!

But you can’t put it in a movie without copyright permission: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jun/14/happy-birthday-lawsuit-copyright-warner

A simple solution would be whomever’s contributions to the song were used in the finished product would be included as a composer of the song.

Hi Mario

So maybe "Happy Birthday" is a bad example. Lets change that to "The Entertainer". I believe that is public domain.

The point is that the power comes from not trying to attribute the creation to any person(s) but from it being completely open and free. We do it for the love of it not for the money. And from that effort everybody learns, whether they contribute or not. "Everybody" owns the song, whether they contributed or not. It is public domain before the 75 years (or whatever the rule is) is up.

There is a lovely quote in the book that quotes Woody Guthrie's copy right notice; "This song is Copyrighted in US, under Seal of Copyright 154085, for a period of 28 years, any anybody caught singing it will be mighty good friends of ours, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it, Write it. Sing it. Swing it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do"

Joanne, there is plenty of precedent for this in the software world where millions of folks create software and release it for collaboration or use by others. you can release it for non-commercial use or you can have it wide open (so Dolly can record it and solely profit from it!)

if you are not familiar with Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), that would be a good place to start reading as they have a complete process for licensing copyrightable works. should you decide to proceed you could explore what they offer, and then set up your collaborative network using that (or some other) as the basis/requirement for participating.

in fact, you can already find music licensed via Creative Commons around the web. check out SoundCloud for example,

https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds?q=work&filter.license=to_modify_commercially

click on one of the songs returned from this search, then click on the Creative Commons license logo and you will see how the author has chosen to license the work. as an example (that I did not listen to), https://soundcloud.com/3lau/work-hard-play-hard and when you click the license link, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

oh, and just to clarify, I am not suggesting that your idea for a collaborative project is already in existence...only that some of the tools you would need like licensing, are available. and those should help move your project forward should you decide to pursue it!

I wish that more people had Woody's attitude!

Note that I am not against your idea and in fact I think it is a good one. I would gladly join in on a free for all musical experience. Hopefully all who might join in would feel the same. If it is stated up front that no ones owns the song then no one should complain!

There was a site called Collaboration Central which was owned by a regular poster on the N-Track site which Mac and I frequented. It failed promptly because, in my opinion, there was no definite direction to the song and each contributor wanted to take the "germ" of the song in separate directions. It soon became a divisive thing that came between good friends.

Jo,

Every year thousands of hack and more professional (people that get paid writing music) participate in the February Album Writing Month challenge to write 14 songs in the month of February.

I've been a participant for 5 or 6 years. Each year collaborations are done by hundreds from these thousands of participants.

I encourage you to join in next year at www.fawm.org

A smaller group of people go really crazy with it and do 50/90, writing 50 songs in 90 days over the northern hemisphere summer months.

Many collaborations happen there as well.

There are also other songwriting sites where collaborations and meetups are part of the joy of participation. Check out the Just Plain Folks website.

http://www.jpfolks.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/postlist/Board/4/page/1

Lots of folks looking to collaborate there.

As for 'making it big', well, good luck - literally.

Making it small can be had by all.

There's an old adage....

"too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth".

I encourage you to really check out the links Scott posted, especially JPFolks.

Not saying you idea is good or bad - personally not something I'd be interested in.

I agree on FAWM and 50/90 whole heartedly! in fact, I'm in the middle of 50/90 right now!

Hi All

Thanks all for the responses. I appreciate you all taking the time to comment.

I think on the FAWN and JPfolks collaborations there is always an element of “ownership” on the songs that are produced (correct me if I am wrong here please).

Don, “collaboration central” does sound like a bit like what I am suggesting but my question is was there any underlying notion of “ownership” of the song or the ideas? Because if this is so, there is almost certainly going to be broken friendships about the direction a certain idea takes.

Mario, what you say about a “free for all musical experience” is more what I am envisaging.

Scott, the intention is not to “make it big” but just the opposite ie not to make anything at all (financially speaking) but to enrich ourselves through the experience.

Josie; on the “too many cooks spoil the broth”, the book I am talking about tries to disprove this with loads of examples where mass collaboration has wielded extraordinary results (such as Linux, Craigslist and I Love Bees). It proposes that we are moving away for the top down authoritarian model like MacDonalds to a more egalitarian system.

John; I have not had a really good look around Creative Commons but it seems to talk about a system to license your work. I am saying that the work doesn't get licensed and there is no such thing as "your work". It is everybody's.

(PS. I hope I don’t come across as defensive in this reply. Just really wanted to gauge if people would be interested in something like this)

I think you are right about FAWM in that there is still ownership or shared ownership for collabs.

As far as licensing goes, seems to me it would be a necessary component to do what you are proposing. If there is no ownership at all maybe someone down the line would claim/establish ownership and turn around and prohibit you from ever using the song? Or they decide to make a song you care deeply about the theme for something horrendous. If you have licensed the work you can cover some of these issues in advance.

Open source software can still be owned/copyrighted and often is but it is then licensed with specific requirements as to its usage. Sometimes those requirements are strict such as no commercial use allowed and sometimes they are completely wide open for any sort of use without even attribution. But even in those cases you usually get a license and not ownership of the software.


But that is all the technical/business side of things plus I understand what you are proposing is a bit different. I gave this some thought about the creative side and from my perspective I just don't see how it would work. Creatives tend to be proud of their work and I think it would be very difficult to create songs in this manner. We do it, at least in part, to be able to step back and say "I did that!"

Do you know of anything like this that has been tried? I am not very much in tune with the music, art or literature worlds but would be curious to know if this concept has worked anywhere outside of things like software.


Oh, one other question...I was curious how Craigslist and I Love Bees related to this idea? One is a privately held corporation and the other a viral marketing campaign. Although I guess they both engage(d) tremendous numbers of people.

one other thing I was going to mention about FAWM and 50/90, they do something called an exquisite corpse where multiple participants each take something others have previously worked on and they add to it and pass it along. It seems more structured (like a game) and maybe more restrictive than what you are thinking but might be interesting for you to check out (personally I do not care for these that much!) Here is a link to some conversation,

http://fiftyninety.fawmers.org/content/exquisite-corpse-charlie-delta-echo

and here is a link to an example,

http://fiftyninety.fawmers.org/song/1888

Hi John
Sorry about my absence, I was off sailing for the weekend so was not at my computer.



I think on this point, I suppose there is that risk but it would be totally against the spirit of the thing. (People are always stealing songs!!)


On this, I don’t think that anybody would become particularly attached to a song..It’s not theirs to become attached to, their name is not on it. So they wouldn’t really care if somebody made something horrendous out of it, (same as you probably wouldn’t care is somebody took a song of mine and did something horrendous with it).


This is the beauty of this, you can have a small part in something that can become great, you can say, “I helped with that melody or I wrote that lyric”


Not sure yet, will get back to you on this one.

Yes, Craigslist and I love bees all involve(d) collaboration on a massive scale. As far as I understand, with I love Bees, there was no financial reason for people to play at all (correct me it I am wrong. I never played!).

I will check out the FAWM thing.

It has been done in instrumental electronic music at least as far back as 10 years ago. The first time I encountered it it was called a "music virus." (I don't know whether that is the only term used for the concept.) Musical sequences would be created and passed on via disk to be modified by subsequent user/listeners. I would assume that with the maturation of the internet there is even more of this now, but I would have no idea how to tap into it, and I'm not sure I'd want to. Something about the term "virus" that raises a vague alarm. O_o

FYI,

Richard

Yes over at Kara-Moon.com this has happened. Collaborations are a big part of that site and there have been no issues with those involved.

In some collabs someone will write a song and others will chime. In this case the songwriter owns the song. In other collabs a lead, bass or chord line will be posted and all can join in. In this case no one owns the song.