The band Metric has been quite succesful with their latest album Fantasies, despite releasing it without a record label.

How did they finance the album?
Typically the record label will advance the artist money to record an album. When the album is finished, a percentage of the album sales are recouped by the label to pay off the loan. So one of the problems with not being on a record label is finding the money finance the recording. Metric was able to finance the record through the Canadian non-profit Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR).

FACTOR is dedicated to providing assistance toward the growth and development of the Canadian independent recording industry. They provided Metric with a $50,000 loan, which the band will have to repay. In addition, Metric received a small federal grant from the Canadian government.

How are they making money?
Metric claims to be making more money now then they ever did in all four years as a band. They’ve been using iTunes to distribute their music and are able to pull in $0.77 on the dollar for ever album sold, as opposed to the $0.22 they were receiving when they were on a label.

They’ve also made use of Trent Reznor’s multiple price-point business model. On the Metric site they are offering 5 differ pricing packages. And similarly to Reznor’s story, they’ve sold out of all 500 copies of the “deluxe” package (which is the most expesive at $64.99) in the first 48 hours.

Last week four of the men behind The Pirate Bay were found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. The men have been sentenced to 1 year of jail and over $3million in fines, yet at this point TBP site itself will not be shut down.

In response, Forbes pointed out the obvious: P2P and BitTorrent will continue to reemerge, despite this never-ending witch hunt.

They go on to explain that Google can also be used as a torrent search engine, and that therefore it could be “the new Pirate Bay”. Harvard’s Business School professor Ben Edelman has weighed in, “Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done,” Edelman says. “And if they’re prosecuted, they would have much more interesting arguments in their defense.”

While there is pretty big difference between TPB and Google (namely, Google doesn’t provide a torrent tracker), Google is a pretty reliable source for finding torrents.  Someone here has  taken Edelman’s to the next level and put together a Custom Google search to make it even easier to find music using Google.

And just today I noticed the site The Pirate Google (which does exactly the same thing, but with a more memorable name).

No Doubt have decided to give away their entire catalog of music to fans that buy a “top-priced ticket” (above $42.50) to their summer tour.

No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont had this to say about the offering, “Since the band is heading back to the road, we wanted to find a cool way to get people listening to our music and stoke them with a great deal at the same time.  With this download its easy for fans to get psyched up to hear our music live once again and that rocks.”

The oXcars is an awards show that celebrates free culture and supports the belief that all citizens have the right to benefit from the exchange of information and culture. Live footage from the first ever oXcars held in Barcelona last October has been edited into an hour long movie. I saw a screening of the film in Amsterdam at the Winter Camp 09 festival last month, but now the movie is freely available on the Exgae website (and I’ve posted it below). The oXcars featured live performances from free culture artists and musicians, as well as educational films and dialogue defending “piracy” and criticizing intellectual property rights.

The oXcars is an interesting experiment. Putting together an awards ceremony and deeming some pieces of artwork “superior” and award-worthy gets people’s attention. I think it is similar to the signature “leaves” label given at independent film festivals: regardless of which festival the movie was presented at, people see the leaves and like to say to friends, “so-and-so movie won an award” (implying that therefore it must be worth watching). Awards can cast an aura, and seemingly they make something more desirable. This in turn helps solve problems of discoverability (being able to find quality content). One of the problems with a site like Jamendo (and the web in general) is that there is too much free content and I never know what I should pay attention to or what is junk. Awards help in this case by making suggestions for us.

oXcars 2009 is already in the works, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be long before a category like “Best Creative Commons  Licensed Movie” was included in some of the independent festivals (or even at the Oscars), or if Pitchfork started a Top 10 of free culture musicians. How might this celebration of free culture affect commercial culture?

oXcars, The Movie from eXgae on Vimeo.

Some of the highlights for me include an intellectual property Q&A game (8:20), the “Advanced Realities” screening documenting that follows (12:10), and P2P pioneer Pablo Soto’s acceptance speech (35:16) where he talks about his interview with former-RIAA present Cary Serman on NPR.

As a follow up to this post I’ve included some excerpts from the “conclusions” which were published on the oXcars website:

Above all, the oXcars were a question of attitude, a way of being in the world.

The kind of attitude that recognises the fact that things have changed through the efforts of all the pioneers who have spent years proposing a new paradigm for the production and diffusion of knowledge and those who defend it as a right, and thanks to the natural way in which society is using new technology.

The idea of the oXcars was to put the spotlight on this situation, and to break some of the taboos surrounding it. To act as a bridge between all of the hard background work and the general public who don’t always get to find out about it. And to do it using all available channels, even the mainstream.

We’ve worked from a strategic belief that there is a need to draw attention to these practices, and give them value within society. The oXcars made an effort to include very different realities side by side, because we think it is important to defend shared culture through a clearly identifiable response that respects the specific nature of each path, while sticking to the final objectives. We think that free culture can only exist if it recognises talent and the contributions of each individual. Only then can we provide a dense response, one that comes in so many forms and is so ubiquitous that it is beyond the reach of any attack.