I like to think I walk the walk, not just talk the talk. You know, I don’t go downtown unless I must, I bike to work. I buy organic foods. <rant>I use GNU/Linux and don’t sit behind my Mac talking about how great FOSS is (yeah, I’m calling you out). I believe in compromise and personal priorities, but recently I’ve gotten more and more frustrated by people not getting out of their comfort zones and making excuses. Personal priorities are often excuses. If you don’t believe in FOSS, that’s fine, but don’t claim to like it and then not actually support it. It’s like saying how you love the earth and then driving 30 miles to work. It’s CRAP (I’ll keep this family friendly, but, um crap isn’t exactly what I want to say).
But hey, I’m not a zealot. I’m really not. I just don’t want people fooling themselves and (potentially unintentially) fooling others. </rant>
That’s not the point though. Last night we were talking about how “hippie” people were. Look, I’m more comfortable with the word socialist than 99.9 or so people in this country. I’m pretty left, but I’m way too angry to be a hippie. I said, hey, I listen to punk and metal, not hippie music. The retort was that I listen to “open” punk which is pretty hippie. I like the fact that people are accusing me of listening to Creative Commons music. I do, actually, that feels like a great compliment…but is it true? Now, I’ve been a Last.fm user for over 4 years, so there’s a lot of legacy data out there, but let’s take a look. In the last 7 days, 3 of my top 15 artists were Creative Commons…only one over the past three months though and none in the last six months or the last year (unless you count NIN…sure, let’s count them). If you look at the all-time stats, Severed Fifth (Jono Bacon’s “band”) rolls in at 347. Holy Pain and Predator both roll in at 444. And since we’ve been counting NIN, they roll in at 76. After finishing the post (before publishing) I realized there might be a couple of other bands in the top 500 and sure enough Gråsuggorna and No Se both roll in at 304. Obviously, this is all subject to change.
Also, I should note that many people believe that -NC (non-commercial) is non-free and by a strict definition it isn’t. I, on the other hand, am much less cozy with -ND (no derivatives). I’ve been meaning to post a blog on the -NC topic, but suffice it to say that while I believe in copyleft and freedom in software, software is a tool. Art is art…unless it’s marketing. There’s a time and place for marketing, but let’s not confuse the two.
Back to the point, even though NIN is so high *because* of their new Creative Commons albums, it’s also so high because of a large back catalog of non-Creative Commons stuff. Essentially, there are five bands in my top 500 (all in the lower half). This maks for some convenient math; 1%. This hardly qualifies me as listening to “open” punk. By the same logic, I listen to rap. Though there are only 4 bands (unless you include Limp Bizkit and maybe others), The Beastie Boys (88), Eminem (69), Dr. Dre (357) and Cypress Hill (226) have a *much* higher average. I have a total tracks played number so I could do some other stats, but I don’t want to beat this to death.
The point of all of this (including the rant) is to challenge us all to do a better job. Fighting the good fight takes a lot of energy. It takes energy I often don’t have after a long day at work. We need to encourage each other and work together. Is there something I can do to help you migrate to GNU/Linux? Is there something I can do to help your Creative Commons’ music? Since we need all the help we can get, I guess I’ll work with you Mac fan boys too.
One last thing for music fans and Apple fan boys alike. If you think audio editing is just for the fruity among us, come see Tom Ray of Lorenzo’s Music give a presentation on audio editing in Linux on August 18th. I’d love to give you guys and gals some more links, but like usual I’m running up against bed time and a long to-do list.
