Today avant garde musician Bob Ostertag released digital downloads of all of his recordings that he holds the rights to under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. There will doubtless be a post on the CC weblog about this, but I write here as a fan of Ostertag’s music. To my taste this is the best music to be made available under a CC license so far. It’s too bad he didn’t choose Attribution-ShareAlike instead of Attribution-NonCommercial, but I can’t have everything I want. (Via Steev Hise.)

On a slightly related (see below) note, I’m really looking forward to the Kronos Quartet performance with Matmos April 21 at Yerba Beuna. My review of a Kronos/Asha Bhosle concert last fall, also at YB.

(Ostertag performed with Kronos on All the Rage, unfortunately not one of the recordings he holds the rights to and Matmos was a contributor to the CC/WIRED CD.)

Addenda 20060326: The CC blog post.

On second read I noticed this in Ostertag’s mini-essay (emphasis added):

Saying goodbye to record royalties is in any event no great sacrifice for a musician such as myself, whose music has always been too adventurous to be valued by the mass market anyway. Strangely, many musicians I know whose work lies outside the mainstream remain much more invested in the idea of selling their recordings than their actual experience in the market would seem to justify.

This rings true to me. I’ve often been surprised at just how proprietary some artists are — many being generally suspicious of capitalism and in no position to make more than a pittance selling their art under any regime. Double or triple irony.

Ostertag’s release (but not the above quote) reminds me of a concert he gave February 25, 1998 at Venue 9 in San Francisco. I found myself sitting next to Don Joyce of Negativland and tried to convince him to be more radical about IP, in addition to expressing appreciation for his work.