TS-Blog

Togeo Free Music

Well as you can probably see the artists at the Togeo Studio music net label ‘Togeo Music’ have decided. To help spread the spirit of free arts that is growing by leaps and bounds throughout the internet, all of our basic music will be distributed for free under the Creative Commons licensing pratice. What this means is, Togeo Music is freely distributable at no cost. You may copy it, share it, (in most cases) remix it, and spread it around to your hearts desire. You can even use it commercially, as long as its in keeping with each authors licensing requirements. For a more complete understanding of the CC license go here.

This is not really a change for us as we always intended to release our music for free. We do appreciate donations to the site to help keep it running and the artists to keep them going if you like their work. It has opened up some new concerns and possibilities as well so it has been under consideration for us for a while on exactly how to do this and still pay for bandwidth, server fees and such but we believe that if we treat our members and users right, the fans and followers will also. There are several licensing systems and we looked into them all but CC has the best protection for the authors work while continuing to allow a dispersion of the music itself throughout the community. We hope to expand the ability of our artists and all artists for that matter, to be able to spread there art and music to a maximum audience allowing for a greater appreciation of their work. Music should be heard and Art should be seen, period. That is why you see the reviews and links sectiions helping to promote other artists offerings and software developers free or affordable, synths, effects and programs as well.

All of our music is available on Jamendo which is a strong supporter of free music and CC licenses. Be sure to check our music reviews in the music section where we feature some of the best artist and music available for free online.

As for our webshop at IThinkMusic, where we were selling higher quality versions of the albums, that will be pulled this week. This doesn’t mean that we are totally against payment for music, just that it shouldnt be the bottom line. While we think the people at ITM are doing an incredible job to help artists sell their track and have one of the best profit sharing (in favor of the artist) models of all the ’shops’ available online, its just not where we are heading at the moment. We will be looking into some options to have FLAC lossless format files available and possibly including bonus tracks and artwork. We are thinking of it being more in line with the Nine Inch Nails model of asking what you are willing to pay and leaving the options open to the consumer.

We will post in our blog any further developments and we are open to all suggestions and discussions on this topic either here in the comments or in our forum.