| |
| Jamison Young, by Dominick Chen |
 |
|
Message to iCommons |
by Interviewee: Jamison Young, Interviewer: Dominick Chen |
|
|
Images
BY: Jamison Young, www.hafhp.org CC BY 3.0
BY: Jamison Young, www.optapra.net CC BY 3.0
BY: Jamison Young, artist's page CC BY 3.0
BY: Jamison Young, album 'Shifting Sands of a Blue Car' CC BY 3.0
Jamison Young describes himself as an independent artist. And he defines 'independent' as the following:
In•de•pen•dent: (adj.) Not having sold one's life, career, and creative works over to a corporation.
Indeed, Young, based in Prague, Czech Republic, with 15 years of career as a professional singer-song-writer, has lost interest in production recording ever since he 'understood' the principles that rule the music industry and met the Creative Commons licensing. And today, besides his live show activities, he runs two projects to respond to this situation: HungryArtistsFeedHungryPeople (HAFHP) and OptApra, both promoting the use of Creative Commons licenses among musicians.
"The more you understand the music industry, the more you question what you hear", says Young. Because he believes that an artist's role is to "connect your art with yourself and then show that connection to the people", he strongly opposes to the way collecting societies and publishers inhibit artists' autonomy in every sense of the term. According to him, live musicians strived to make good shows in the 80's. During the 90's, the business aspect burgeoned, and entering the 21st century, it is even not about the artists themselves anymore, but about their capital value as symbolic labels, because collecting societies can only promote merchandisation of artists among the publishers and major record labels.
However, he sees positiveness in that the amount of musicians creating good music are also increasing; and these independent artists are becoming more and more visible thanks to the many Internet services such as MySpace and Jamendo. And he thinks he found a strong tool to push these artists' autonomy even further when he's taught about the Creative Commons license (by a person he randomly met in a subway in Vienna). Then he conceives an idea that would allow independent artists to live fully their musical life without being herded by the collecting societies and publishers by connecting them with charity organizations: thus the name 'HAFHP', 'Hungry Artists Feed Hungry People'.
Through 'HAFHP', artists would be able to build a license based on a Creative Commons license that would allow chosen charities to use the commercial right of the music provided to them. This way, charities can make use of the contributed works to fundraise without the restriction imposed by collecting societies. And the artists can earn publicity through this beneficence, while not losing their own commercial right because of the license's non-exclusive nature. Now Young is preparing to make HAFHP an iCommons node, and is also discussing with UN's World Food Project to create ties with various charities.
OptApra is a parallel project where Young intends to rise awareness of artists on the nature of collecting societies, based on his own experience of opting out his works from APRA, the Australian and New Zealander collecting society.
"Artists want to be recognized, that they do exist" says Young. "Creative Commons is a good tool for this purpose", while not having to run into destroying other people's properties or giving up your own rights. Participating to the iSummit for the first time, he also felt that the conference sometimes is too speculative and abstract for artists like himself: he left iCommons a practical advice in the short video message below, in addition to one of his own CC:BY licensed track from his last album.
Links:
Hungry Artists Feed Hungry People
http://www.hafhp.org/
http://www.hafhp.org-a.googlepages.com/home
OptApra
http://www.optapra.net/
tags: prague czech republic culture music collecting-societies charity artist summit07
|
|
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and and your comments right after.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
send
printer-friendly version
invite to vote
add a comment
