And the Winners are... Free! Music! Contest 2011 - FreeMixter

Press release of 12 september 2011

July 1st 2011 has been the starting day of this year's Free! Music! Contest, the motto is "FreeMixter". The contest run by Musikpiraten e.V. took places the third time and has already reached some international publicity in the Creative Commons music scene. This year's focus is on enabling remixes - as the motto indicates. Therefor the remix portal ccmixter.org is embedded where artists like Mike Shinoda (Link Park), DJ Vadim and the Beastie Boys have released single tracks from their songs to enable the creation of remixes.

As a musical patron the canadian Allison Crowe could be won. Crowe has become worldwide known for her interpretaion of "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. She releases her own work under Creative Commons at jamendo.com for years. In her function as the patron Allison Crowe makes a delicate gift to the Creative Commons remix scene: She released a acapella version and piano tracks of "Spiral". They can be downloaded in high quality at the Musikpiraten's server and be used for own Songs.

The first two years the Free! Music! Contest was more a "Shareable! Music! Contest". "Free" has been used in the sense of "free beer" instead of in "freedom". All published songs were free to be copied and shared, but commercial use and - what's even more important - creating derrivate works has not been allowed for a lot of songs. The concept worked out: More than 130 bands and artists coming from over 30 countries joined the contest and a very well balanced sampler has been produced. But has this been the right way? Does only size matter? The Musikpirat say firmly "No!". So this year the rules had been changed. Freedom rulez free beer. Every winner song is released cc-by or cc-by-sa.

The result is a sampler with 19 songs that can be downloaded for free at Bandcamp. Friends of classical media can buy a double CD in a DigiPack. The second CD contains the source tracks of the winning songs. The CDs can be ordered via bandcamp too, the price is 2,50€. Who wants to pay more is free to do so. A pretty bunch of remixes can be found at ccmixter.

Listen to the songs!




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