Ever copied a friends CD, downloaded mainstream music for free or listened to music on YouTube? If the answer to any of these things was yes, you have technically broken the law. Yet nobody actually cares, nobody besides the record labels that is.

Music is simply a fundamental part of human culture, it invokes emotions, inspires ideas and binds communities. People naturally like to share the music that they enjoy. The record industry however wants none of this, they just want to monopolise the market and make as much money as they can.

The source of this opposition stems from the early days of recorded music, like all new technologies, recording music was an expensive and complicated business. Over time the production costs naturally dropped and technology evolved. Analogue tape made it possible for anyone duplicate music, but because duplicating analogue audio reduces its quality, it was not a major problem for the record industry.

Then the internet and digital music happened. Suddenly the cost of distributing music fell to almost zero and the mass-shearing of music began. Digital music is just data, data can be easily copied and duplicated with no loss of quality, removing the record labels as the soul source of music and slashing there profits.

In an attempt to regain some control, they came up with various DRM schemes, one even going as far as distributing a rootkit with there CD’s. But they still failed completely to prevent people from shearing music on the internet.

So, if the prevention of copying is impossible, what alternatives are there? The most obvious, is to join the trends. Give the music away without charge and allow distribution. An ever increasing number of bands is doing just that, bypassing the record industry and releasing there music free of charge on the internet.

Surely these are just bad bands that were not able to get a deal with a record label? Not necessarily, the record labels mainly interested in music that is widely appealing as it will make them the most money. A band may be good, but if there music is not widely appealing, the record industry is unlikely to be interested. Self-publishing and bypassing the record industry completely may be the only chance they have.

To support this movement, a number of community websites have sprang up, one of the most well known being Jamendo. These websites allow bands releasing free music to find an audience without needing the support of a record label, nor have a massive marketing budget.

The last question remaining is how a band releasing there music for free could actually make any money. The methods used are as wide and varied as music itself, but it boils down to three basic ideas:

• Require a payed licence for commercial use.
• Sell band merchandise.
• Run a “Pay what you want” scheme.

Although these options may seam impractical, in practice they are not actually too bad. In the traditional record industry, the label takes the vast majority of the profit, leaving only a small amount for the artists. In order to make a living under such a system you need to sell an extremely large number of albums. When you take control of monetising your work, you keep 100% of the profit, massively reducing the number of supporters required to make a living.

It remains to be seen exactly how much of an impact free culture music has in the long run. Ether it could become the standard model for music production. Alternately it could gain a substantial following, yet remain unknown to the masses, like the free software movement.

My next blog post will continue to investigate Free Culture Music by interviewing an in insider, Jono Bacon of the Severed Fifth project.