Thoughts on free and open source music?

Trent Reznor (NIN) is an open supporter of this. He's supplied source files and multitrack recordings for many tracks before for people to remix and mess with. Not quite the same but that came to mind anyhow

The world would be a very different place without Kevin MacLeod's music

Fantastic. We need more content and art that is free for creative (re)use. I think this is called Free culture or Libre culture.

I think not only computer code is better when it's FLOSS, but every form of art greatly benefits from remixing, people taking something and pushing it forward. Using art as a from of debate.

And this works especially well without additional shackles like restrictive copyright or being proprietary.

This is one of my favourite things about tracker music. It's obviously a lot more complicated to share the full source files for music that uses a workflow involving paid tools or that is complex to replicate. The de facto openness of the tracker format is something that is unlikely to be seen again, but rendering stems / sharing patches / encouraging sampling are all still valuable.

I'd love to see a healthy foss music scene that encorages building on one another's work and would definitely participate. Music is way more interesting when we don't have to fight economic territorialism to make it, as complicated a path as that has become.

It gets a little more difficult with music that is recorded, uses expensive VSTis or where the mixing and mastering is crucial. The raw files aren't very useful for others.

Tracker music has always been open. Can't upload a mod file and expect people not to rip the samples.

Sunvox is also very open like that, because everyone has the same modules, it's only a matter of how they're used. It also reads xm and mod files. The program comes with lots of user created tracks and people gladly post the files.

I take a similar approach to my compositions and arrangements on Musescore. Anyone can download the sheet music file and edit it, and most everything I do is under Creative Commons attribution/noncommercial. A lot of other Musescore users do this, it allows for a lot more accessible and free sheet music of both modern and classical music.

I think it's a great idea. Using melodies from other songwriters/composers has been a part of the western music tradition for centuries: Brahms writing his Academic Festival Overture with melodies from a bunch of drinking songs, Tchaikovsky using both the Russian and French national anthems in the 1812 Overture, both Brahms and Rachmaninoff having pieces titled Variations on a Theme by Paganini, basically the entire history of Jazz music, half of the discography of Led Zeppelin, etc. It seems the logical continuation of this tradition in the digital age would be make samples or sound libraries available for other artists to use. Music is the most collaborative form of art after all, and copyright laws only serve to hinder that while enriching a select few -- with those few very infrequently being the actual artists.

Quick plug for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who released their album Polygondwanaland for free, including the vinyl masters. So anyone who wanted to could press their own vinyl of the album with their own album art and even create their own music videos. There were a ton of small record labels who made their own prints with super cool designs.

ccmixter.org is a site that does this.

Sounds good, would also be great to have some platform on the fediverse where open source music is shared, so that anyone could make their own spotify-like app to listen to it. And it would need to get some way to donate to the artists

Why not, sounds nice. But I think it will remain a niche thing. Open source qualities are IMHO not that critically important for art, and I believe neither artists, nor art consumers care that much.