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In the spirit of open source technology, Jona Bechtolt, aka YACHT, an electronic musician here in Portland has decided to give away instrumental versions of his music for free. This is his explanation:

“I download music. I download a lot of music. I don’t purchase music often, so I completely and totally understand when kids come up to me at shows and look me straight in the eye and tell me they’re not going to buy my record tonight because they’ve already, or are going to go home and, download it. There just isn’t any reason to show animosity towards this new-ish way of communicating; to me, this feels like a natural way of weeding out assholes and the people that aren’t smart enough to make interesting work.I want to give back. Here are three ZIP files of instrumentals. Download them, use them for karaoke, perform as YACHT or The Blow, chop them up and make your own remixes, make your own new songs.”

It’s a cool idea that I imagine will lead to some free publicity, and most likely some new collaborations. It reminds me of a Mirah album that came out last year called “Joyride: Remixes” where a bunch of different artists remixed versions of Mirah songs for a 2-CD set. YACHT was one of the collaborators, coincidentally. That CD wasn’t free, and I could imagine this YACHT venture turning into some sort of similar compilation, a physical CD for example, potentially for some profit.

This gets back to my previous claim about this being an open source style of behavior. A common misconception is that because open source technology is free, there is no money to be made in it. To the contrary, think of all of the designers, developers and system admins who have jobs because of their intellectual investment in technologies like Apache, Linux, PHP, Subversion MySQL, Wordpress, Drupal and on and on and on. While a certain aspect of all open source technology is free, what is not is the time and skill needed to implement it, the people that ARE smart enough to make interesting work.

As a Web developer himself, I imagine Jona is aware of these similarities. I’m excited to see what comes of his decision to release his music in this fashion. Hopefully “Freedom Music: Remixes” is on the way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Cool Sites, Tech Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.