36: Make Instrumental Mixes

Make mixes of your album without the lead and background vocals and throw your in- strumental tracks into the licensing ring. It doubles your available catalog and opens up opps for shows that do not use vocal music. If your w/vocal mixes are already copy written (if they’re not, seriously, I will beat you senseless when I see you on the street), you don’t need to register these instrumental mixes separately because the music on them has already been registered. An instrumental placement won’t get your voice out there in TV land, but it could pay for your next EP.

- Phil Putnam

http://www.philputnam.com/

69: Tell Them It’s Okay To Share With Creative Commons Licensing

Copyright law is clear: Your songs are yours. But what if you want to tell people it’s okay to share your music, or use it for noncommercial purposes, as long as they at- tribute you? Enter creativecommons.org, a simple way to license your music to let people know what you want people to do with your music, while keeping the rights that you want to reserve. If you use the creativecommons.org website banners on your own site, your music can come up in searches for Creative Commons material, which can get your music used, and exposure in places you would never have dreamed about.

- Randy Chertkow

http://randycon.org

The derivative works clause of the Creative Commons license didn’t cost me a bit of time or money and I found niches I never knew about including the World of Warcraft Machinima Music Videos. A video artist named Spiff created 15 videos using my music and there is a huge online community of people who love Machinima videos. Some of them have been viewed millions of times which is VERY good for someone who has a marketing budget of zero dollars… It would never have happened if I had posted warnings about my content

- Jonathan Coulton

http://www.jonathancoulton.com