All posts by buddard

In light of an article by Erik Möller entitled Creative Commons -NC Licenses Considered Harmful and the discussions surrounding it, we have decided to relicense all our music under the less restrictive Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means that our music may now be used commercially without our permission.

The ShareAlike condition should provide enough protection against commercial exploitation, since any added value (such as CD cover art for example) counts as a derivative work, and as such has to be released to the public under an identical license. The Attribution condition makes sure that we are attributed as specified in our license notice (i e the artists’ name and immaterialmusic.com should be clearly visible).

As always, if you would like to do something with our music but feel that the license is too restrictive or incompatible with your own license, just contact us and we can probably work something out.

Ever heard of belarusian progressive alternative rock before? Me neither, until I heard Earworm. Their 7-track debut EP entitled ‘Serious Ear’ really is a serious assault on the senses. With a lineup consisting of drums, bass, guitar and cello (no vocals), things are bound to get interesting. The songs themselves typically build up from a simple melody to complete distorted chaos. Highly recommended!

This gem is released through german label analog und ehrlich and hosted by archive.org.

Through Copyfight, I found an excellent article by Derek Slater entitled “The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music”. It manages to explain in very simple terms exactly why DRM hurts music fans. For example:

Imagine if Tower Records sold you a CD, but then, a few months later, knocked on your door and replaced the CD with one that you can’t play in your car. Would you still feel like you “owned” the CD? Not so much, eh?

But Apple reserves the right to change at any time what you can do with the music you purchase at the iTunes Music Store. For instance, in April 2004, Apple decided to modify the DRM so people could burn the same playlist only 7 times, down from 10. How much further will the service restrict your ability to make legal personal copies of your own music? Only Apple knows.

When will “the industry” finally understand that DRM only serves to annoy and alienate their own customers? I already boycott DRM’ed audio files and copy protected CDs — Hopefully informative pieces like this one will encourage more people to do the same.

Today I came across a very good essay on copyright issues entitled Fixing Copyright. It was written by a group of grad students in the US last year, and tries to pinpoint what’s wrong with current copyright laws, but more importantly, it also suggests what we can do to fix them.

Although the essay is US-centric, most of the concepts and problems presented in it can be applied to other parts of the world. As we speak, global music industry lobby groups such as IFPI are working hard to get similar copyright laws passed in the European Union.

On the new Buddard album there’s a song called ‘Two tons of steel’, that we wrote about our friends’ ’63 Buick Riviera. He suggested that we post a link to it over at the Riviera owner’s association. So we did, and a few days later this video appeared out of the blue:

(.wmv, 7MB)

It was made by a proud Riviera owner who calls himself 75RivGS. We’d like to thank him for making this very cool video, and for letting us host it here!

The time has finally come to unveil Buddard‘s brand new album: Wish you were beer. Thanks to everyone involved — You know damn well who you are!

The competition is over: The CD goes to Sven Hedberg, who correctly guessed that the image above is an extreme closeup of a pulltab (see album cover).

We’ve once again decided to push back the release date of the Buddard album that was due for february 1st. Sorry. It will be released as soon as it’s finished. In the meantime, enjoy this teaser track:

Loads of beer (4.4MB).

There’s also a competition: The first person to guess what the background in the image above is will receive a free Buddard CD when it’s released. email us your best guess (just one per person).

Today we finally release Samaadhi’s first full length effort, Mindless. It’s been a long journey, more than four years, and we’re really proud of the result.

We’d like to thank everyone who made this project possible: Lage and Patrik for their excellent performances, Fred for coming over for tea and chats every now and then, Alex for lending us equipment, Mankan for his technical advice, and Jesus, Enrique, Martin and Magnus for providing their inspiration.

Samaadhi’s first EP ‘Oblivion’ is the first release on immaterial music ever! Expect a full album after the summer.