The Colbert Report Remix Session: online communities collaborate to remix Lessig and Colbert.

Ok I’m kind of late on this but it’s still worth mentioning.

Larry Lessig, crusader for new copyright laws, was invited on the Colbert Report 5 days ago to discuss his new book ‘Remix. Making Art And Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy‘, which deals with new ‘hybrid’ economies (where “commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies”), how they are thriving thanks to user generated content, and how this needs to affect current copyright legislation.

I have already had the chance to read one of his older books, Free Culture, and recommend it to all of you who have the least bit of interest in the copyright issues of the 20th century. You might not agree with all Lessig says, but still, it’s a very good read (download for free and legally on the Free Culture website)

Anyways, so Stephen Colbert invited Lessig not so much to discuss, but rather to fuss about and take the piss out of his new book:

Colbert is a funny guy, no doubt about it, but pretty obnoxious. Of course you must take into account the fact that he plays the role of a right-wing reactionary in his Colbert Report who reflects the reasoning and the understanding of the un-educated.

He does this marvelously with Lessig. When he states  “[To camera] Never, ever, ever, ever take anything of mine and remix it. For instance, I’ll be very angry and possibly litigious if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remix it with some great dance beat and then it starts showing up in clubs across America”  he’s cryin’ for the online communities to have a go at it. It was a good call ’cause people got to work.

There is currently a session going on on Indaba until the 22th of Jan dedicated to remixing the interview. If you wanna have a go at it, or if you just wanna have a listen, there are some very good mixes in there. On the due date, Indaba plans on inviting both Lessig and Colbert to the session. This promises to be pretty entertaining if they do show up.

The ccMixster community is also hard on the job. Check out their session here.

mruff.

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Minimum Noise: get paid to collaborate

We have often talked about online collaboration websites for musicians on this blog, and today we’re going to review yet another platform that just came out. The new twist that Minimum Noise brings to the collab scene is  that it’s the first site that cuts to the chase and involves money. Musicians offer compensation for the collaborative efforts brought to their projects.

What I like about Minimum Noise’s approach is that there’s no bling-bling to it. Sure, it’s great to have a beautifully CSS-styled site like Indaba with widgets, players and mixers, but most of those tools are gimmicks to some extent. We don’t need them to get the job done, and overall they often constitute a source of distraction. Minimum Noise doesn’t offer a whole production suite to lure users in, but it involves money, which is all the motivation musicians need to start collaborating in a concrete manner.

At the risk of sounding capitalistic, we need sites like these. 2007 and 2008 have brought us tons of services and platforms for musicians filled with social features that are maybe great for networking on a friendly level, but not so much on a professional level.

For now, online music collaboration has yet to prove it’s worth. Maybe Minimum Noise’s compensation model is one of the right steps to get the ball rolling.

woof

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Turn your mobile phone into a portable recorder with IndabaVox

The online music collaboration platform Indaba came out with a new experimental feature it calls IndabaVox. It’s gives you remote access to your sessions via mobile phone and allows you to record from where ever you’re calling as well as set up conference calls with other members of your session.

All you need to do is go to your account settings, register your phone number, and go to your default session to enable the service. You will be given IndabaVox’s hotline and a PIN. Seconds after dialing you are greeted by the lovely voice of some damsel who gives you the options of recording or doing a conference call.

The whole process is done very quickly and I received my recordings in my session within minutes. The idea of turning your phone into a portable recorder is great to record on-the-spot ideas if means of recording are nowhere to be found in your premises. Would be even greater if Indaba could playback your session somehow so you could actually record to a reference track.

This reminds me of VoodooVox’s MyVox free API that also turns your mobile into a microphone. The mobile technology firm entered in partnership with Ludacris’s WeMix collaboration website back in June. Although they both set out to do more or less what Indaba has done with IndabaVox, I have yet to figure out where and how I enable the MyVox feature in my WeMix account seeing as the process is much less transparent.

Since we’re talking about portable recorders and music collabs:

• For an overview of the major online music collaboration websites out there, click here.

• For an overview of some very cool affordable portable digital recorders, click here.

Woof.

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