Reduce, Reuse, Remix

04-19-2008 | 12:21 AM EST

For artists to be commercially successful (or even just share their work with others at all), they need to make sure that people know about what they're doing. And while getting the word out can be relatively easy with the backing of a major corporate distributor, trying to promote yourself when your skills are really in content creation rather than promotion can be pretty tough. But, for as long as people have been making anything, they've also been finding lots of creative ways to promote themselves and their work. From musicians selling their music out of the backs of their cars (a method that fueled a lot of the early days of hip hop sales) to painters and photographers exhibiting their work in local festivals and gallery walks, artists find a way.

One relatively new way that musicians in particular have been really connecting with and growing their audiences is through remixing. Rather than trying to keep a tight reign on how their music is spread, shared, and related to, some musicians have discovered that by relaxing usage rights, their popularity has soared. Essentially, the musicians release their music into the public and they encourage people to create remixes of their songs (whether by adding to or subtracting from the song, re-arranging the music, or in any other way changing what the original artist created) and then re-releasing the mix back into the public. Some musicians openly allow the remixers to sell, distribute, and otherwise do whatever they want with the mixes while other artists put some stipulations on it — such as, the remixer can sell his or her mix so long as credit is given to the original artist and the remixer allows other people to remix the mix.

So far, the results seem pretty positive really helping some artists gather a bigger following and even sell more of their music. I'd bet there are even people out there who have learned that while they're maybe not so great at creating songs from scratch themselves, they're pretty good at making remixes that other people really want to hear. And that just means that for every song out there that allows remixing, there's an exponential chance for something to be created that someone else will enjoy.

If you want to find out more about the legal aspect of remixing, you should check out the various licenses offered by Creative Commons, because these are the rules that most music remixing seems to follow right now. And, if you want to try your hand at remixing, check out the websites Splice and Jamglue. They both have great, free online tools to get started remixing. It's a lot of fun and, honestly, anybody can do it!

COMMENTS

Another great remixing site to visit is ccmixter: http://ccmixter.org/

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