John Buckman is the founder of Magnatune, an Internet record label that sells its music under a CC licenses allowing free noncommercial use, but which requires you to take a license if you wanna make a commercial use. The most interesting thing about Magnatune is this one-click-upgrade thing, where if you like what you hear and want a commercial license to use it — say, as part of a film project, Flash app or what have you — you can do it all online in about ten seconds. It's a really new way of conducting a music business, focusing on extracting money from the kind of people who are accustomed to paying for their uses while enabling the public to act as a giant publicity machine for connecting your music with those licensors.
In this article, John presents a primer for British music pros on Creative Commons licenses, explaining how it all works:
Magnatune, like many businesses, exists to make money. As such, I wasn't willing to allow commercial use of our music for free. However, I reasoned that non-commercial use, such as our music appearing in a student film, or having the music appear on music recommendation web sites such as www.webjay.org, would serve as free advertising and create enthusiasm for Magnatune.
When uses of our music are non-commercial, no one is making money from it, and the likelihood of my being able to charge for that use is pretty low. Furthermore, Magnatune's music is widely distributed through these free non-commercial uses, essentially providing us with free advertising. And since Magnatune also licenses its music for commercial use, I reasoned that film students have to eventually graduate, and will then want to pay for our music because of our earlier generosity.
