Soundreef – New service for paying and promoting musicians makes use of Creative Commons

European companies are innovating in the world of creative business models which merge openness and the pursuit of profit for artists. Newest on the scene, launched just today and only to sexy folks like us who got the promo code via email, making us feel special and admittedly a little biased in their favour, is Soundreef. The site is somewhat similar to Magnatune, though Magnatune does not accept all bands onto it’s roster.

Soundreef will be open sign up and free to use for musicians and for most folks looking to make use of music: non-profits, small companies, indie podcasters, can all download the music on the site for free use because everything there is licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike. The site offers these no-budget users automatically generated embed codes that they can use to promote the artist (and Soundreef itself) rather then pay, helping you fulfill the Attribution requirement in style.

For now I find the Soundreef idea pretty interesting and I look forward to seeing whether the friendly, kooky Italian developers behind it can make it all work out.

Here’s some info from them on their project:

Hello Risa,

the insomniac Italian team has finally made it! -
we are very happy indeed to announce the launch of SoundReef.com (the new music online service I had previously wrote to you about). We are huge fans of Indyish, and therefore are delighted to offer you to be amongst the very first to un-disclose the news regarding the launch of our service. Indeed very few other blogs (in fact only 10!) or similar will be receiving any of our material until Wednesday of next week.

The site is now online at http://www.soundreef.com and here is a video explaining the completely innovative Soundreef.com music licensing system:

Multimedia artists can find music that can be used easily and quickly; not only: they can swap payment for promotion if they do not have a budget for music licensing.

Musicians can vehicle their music toward possible uses in multimedia projects and often this is a rewarding situation per se as it helps develop new value for the music itself.

SoundReef.com aims to guarantee musicians’ the correct retribution for their creations. This is the reason behind the request for payment of specific fees in those cases in which clients have sufficient funds to pay for use of music. At the same time, the new service is based on the idea that music can gain much visibility through placements in multimedia-based projects. Therefore SoundReef.com prefers to ask for specific promotion activities instead of monetary compensation in those cases in which a project has genuinely no budget for music licensing, and in the cases of projects that have a non commercial nature or are produced to support socially useful causes.

For open culture activists this license might pose potential problems, because it contains the Share Alike clause. In practice this means if you downloaded one of these tracks and used a bit of it in an arty video you were making, you would not be allowed to licence that video with anything other than CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike. You couldn’t make it more or less free to use, so in a sense your freedom would be restricted. Presumably when companies buy commercial rights a new licence is assigned? Whether this could become an actual problem for users, well we’ll have to wait and see.

Unlike Magnatune which shares profits 50/50 with artists, artists are guaranteed 75% of the profits earned on their music through Soundreef.

But!! follow this promotion link and the first 100 of you will get 95% for the first year:

http://soundreef.com/private_beta/promoterPage?o=33

(Of course 95% of nothing is still nothing so the question is can Soundreef attract buyers for your music? We’ll have to wait and see…)

Also, lastly, I feel like I should note, Soundreef has officially partnered with the Emergenza festival. Emergenza has it’s detractors as the indie music fest requires bands to pay to compete. Whether this is a legit critique of the fest or not, it seems there is little official cross-over between the two organizations aside from some mutual high fives. According to the Soundreef press release:

“All bands inscribing to Emergenza Music Festival will also be offered the opportunity to join SoundReef.com, and will therefore be provided with even wider possibilities of seeing their music reach vast audiences.”

So Soundreef is only loosely connected with the festival, which seems a smart move designed to put their service in front of thousands of emerging eyeballs. Unlike the fest Soundreef definitely Does Not charge artists to use their service.

Anyway, all this to say, congrats to Soundreef on the Beta launch, and good luck tackling the challenges and awesome opportunities ahead. Indie artists around the world can always use another sincere and savvy ally, so thanks for throwing your hat in the ring!