So what music should be included here? One of my longstanding problems with the core game is that none of the soundtrack it uses for the "modern" era is truly modern music.

I long ago concieved a modern world mod, which would use songs that commented upon the situation of the modern world and its changing values, such as Material Girl, Video Killed the Radio Star, Money for Nothing, and The Message. Though certainly those are all oldies now, they commented on a situation that is still relevent.

The alternate side of the coin, with the US declining in influence and other powers attempting to rise in the vacuum, could be portrayed through the popular music of other countries; bands such as Dragonforce, Nightwish, Reflex, Ska-P, and maybe some Latin American, Chinese, and Japanese bands of which I've never heard.

Copyright is an issue, but back when Second Revolution skirted that, it was one of my favorite mods. Share your thoughts!

I long ago concieved a modern world mod, which would use songs that commented upon the situation of the modern world and its changing values, such as Material Girl, Video Killed the Radio Star, Money for Nothing, and The Message. Though certainly those are all oldies now, they commented on a situation that is still relevent.

That's awesome! I'll think about some songs.

Copyright is an issue, but back when Second Revolution skirted that, it was one of my favorite mods. Share your thoughts!

Hmmm...this might be a hazardous idea but anyway: We could avoid the copyright issue by using something like Last.fm. I can imagine two possibilities doing this. One brilliant with probably a lot of effort, one tentative that could be quite easy.

First thing we need to do is a joint effort to create a "World 2009" tag list in Last.fm with a list of maybe 100 songs. Each of these songs needs to be tagged "Civ World 2009 Mod" by multiple persons.

Then

1. Make it possible to let the Civ game play music from a Last.fm stream. I have no idea if this can be done but the fact that there is a Winamp Mod out there (I saw it in sevomod) makes me positive.

or

2. Tell the player that there is a soundtrack available at Last.fm. That way you have to start the Last.fm application while (or before) you play the game and let it play "Civ World 2009 Mod" tagged music and you'd hear it while you play.

I'll start a list of songs here and will edit it whenever someone has new suggestions:

Madonna - Material Girl
The Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star
Dire Straits - Money for Nothing
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message
Dragonforce - ?
Nightwish - ?
Reflex - ?
Ska-P - ?
Laurent Garnier - Greed
Wir sind Helden - Guten Tag
Wir sind Helden - Müssen nur wollen
Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros - Bhindi Bhagee
Le Tigre - Get off the internet
Fergie - G.L.A.M.O.R.O.U.S.
MGMT - Time to pretend
Britney Spears - Piece of me

Have you thought about the Modern Music from civ 3?

When we choose the music, I'd recommend staying away from some of the "heavier" rock bands (even though I am a fan), like Dragonforce. With some of their music in the background it might get a little distracting.

also, remember, civ caters to people of all ages and social groups.

Goodluck with a very difficult task there chaps.

yes I agree with sheep, really tricky. I hadn't thought about it... personally I keep civ music off and listen to my own in the background.


I will let you folks handle this thankless task. :D

? - The Message


Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

When we choose the music, I'd recommend staying away from some of the "heavier" rock bands (even though I am a fan), like Dragonforce. With some of their music in the background it might get a little distracting.

Well, nobody really has to listen to the background music. They can always zoom in and hear some national anthems instead.

also, remember, civ caters to people of all ages and social groups.

Goodluck with a very difficult task there chaps.

You're right, but trying to keep a soundtrack "clean" in terms of things like language should be none of our concern. The modding scene is made up of teenagers and adults, and with this one, those teenagers and adults, regardless of ideals, know enough about the world to know that it's a gritty, two-faced place.

Ska-P may be a little too political for some, so maybe not them, but most other things I suggested are fair game. Above all else, what I want is music from all over the world, so yes, keeping it politically-agnostic may be tricky. It's still a venture worth pursuing, however.

agreed bahmo, good luck with finding the stuff that works :)

be nice to play civ to ingame music and not whatever i have on media player :p

Have we decided on a track for the Main Theme? I think this could be very powerful:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4_LsGSsgwJc

I found it too on last.fm, though I'm not going to pay for it on iTunes. Still, it's a beautifully epic piece that would be bound to raise the hairs on a back of necks as they enter our Mod. ^_^

I'm not paying for any music on itunes, so if that is how we have to do it, someone else will have to if they want to include music. It's not important enough to me to plunk down money, any funds I have available for this project will end up going to hire a programmer probably. Plus I dislike itunes and don't want to support it in any way.

Maybe we could use free/open source music?

http://www.archive.org/details/The.Good.Times.And.The.Bad

Someone else should be in charge of this. If I have to do it, we are going to end up with a bunch of folk and classical music that no one else likes. ;-)

I'm sure you could find the track without paying for it on iTunes to be honest, but someone must be willing to look for it. I'll ask a 'friend' and see if they can ask the creator for me. :)

I could, ahem, make it "appear", I mah "have" it on my laptop already *wink wink nudge nudge*

hmm, I think it's possible I may have an mp3 or two laying around myself...

{removed}


I own all the albums legally of course. Don't download illegally kids, bad for your health.

7 times the amount of songs that I have lol

actually I should take that down before the MPAA sees it and gets the wrong idea. lol

lol, i think you have made ya point aye.

Don't download illegally kids, bad for your health.

Phooey to that. The media business, whether it be TV, radio, or recordings for either sort of thing, is horribly inefficient, obnoxious, and dated. The sooner they crash and burn, the better. Internet should make conventional media obsolete, much in the same way electricity made kerosene obsolete. The old guard can't stop the tide, so they might as well just stop suing for money and action, and instead, just demand stock in a bunch of media sharing websites/web companies, because that's the only way they'll ultimately survive.

I agree, my comment was less than serious. But it's against the rules to discuss pirating on this board, the last thing this mod needs is for one of us to get banned.

Which is why I'm not actually advocating illegal use of music on our soundtrack.

In truth, though, the invention of the Internet logically forces a reevaluation of what piracy is, or maybe just a look at what we used to call it, and update from there. It was never considered piracy when you heard a song for free on the radio, or saw a show for free on TV, nor was it piracy if you taped it for review later. You were only paying whoever provided the device, not the actual owner of the media in question, yet nobody minded.

So with the advent of the Internet, and websites like Youtube, nothing has really changed, except that now you can get what you want, when you want; you don't just have to wait for it to come on. Is that difference really enough to call it piracy? I think not. It really is more like piracy in the cases where a person uploads media who isn't the media's owner, but that is to be expected when the owner doesn't do the same thing first, and an increasing number of media owners do. Like I said, they should just ask for shares of a media website's profits, in return for allowing their media to be viewed for free. The said profits do exist now that Youtube is selling ad space.

I totally agree with you on that Bahmo. But, if these corporations did everything wisely, we would live in a much different world.

For music, there is a logical thing the media companies could do, which would avoid legal battles with pirating sites but still shut them down. It was also make listening to music much easier for the user. They simply need to make those sites obsolete.

The corps that own the rights to music (I think like 5 own 99.9%), should make a program that runs on the bottom, side, whatever of a user's screen, always on top I think is the key. Let the user quickly search for any play any song or album in existence, as if they had every album sitting on their computer. Then simply have this program display a small advertisement at all times.

Who would keep using torrent sites if this existed? The program would be standard in six months. Get MS to include it with windows. The same thing would work for video media.

Their idea to sell songs for a buck a piece on itunes is insane. I guess some people do it, I can't imagine who. The people who listen to what they tell us to do on TV I guess. My music collection would cost $15,000. lol. Not that I've ever pirated anything.

Ok, back to the issue at hand. It would be great if we could find enough freely liscensed music to fill up our soundtrack. A good place to start may be freemusic.freeculture.org (http://freemusic.freeculture.org/). I'm going to start poking around there now.

As Bahmo mentioned, it would be ideal if we could find music from all around the world. Kai, what's hot in Hong Kong right now? Most of the team is from the UK, USA, and Canada, so if you are from elsewhere, we could particularly use your help here.

Don't leave this to me, or we will end up with nothing but left wing folk music.

Other possible sources:

http://opsound.org/
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/09/13/mix-tape


As a rule, we'll include anything one of our team members likes and suggests. We're a big tent mod, to put it in BS American political terms. No complaining that you don't like someone else's choice, unless there is a valid reason. We should probably not include songs with excessive profanity, we want our mod to be PG-13, or however they rate games these days.

Stuff that relates to civ would be cool; war, economics, culture, etc etc.

A wide variety of music from all countries would obviously the best, so let's see if we can find the music we need for that.

I would suggest tracks 10, 11, and 12 from this album:

http://www.archive.org/details/The.Good.Times.And.The.Bad


Someone else is going to have to find some right wing music to balance.

I would suggest tracks 10, 11, and 12 from this album:

http://www.archive.org/details/The.Good.Times.And.The.Bad


Someone else is going to have to find some right wing music to balance.

I disagree. If fairness is your goal, it's better to remove nearly all political content from songs than it is to try to offend both sides equally. Remember that the vast majority of music on the radio does not comment on politics, something that is probably the same in every culture.

It's a bit different when it's just social commentary, like the songs I suggested in the beginning of the thread. Nobody would have denied that the world was going through a large degree of changes at the time they were written (or that it still is now); changes that many people could agree were unsettling even if they didn't agree who to blame. The Message surely was written about (and during) the Reagan era, but it doesn't attack politicians in its lyrics; again, it's simply complaining about an end result that everybody who thinks clearly at all would find repulsive.

@Bahmo; any free license music you or anyone wants added, I'll add. The songs you mentioned we can't include, they are copyrighted I'm sure. Your suggestion to have music from all around the world is what we should aim for.

The next question, then, is exactly what the copyright laws for music are in other countries. Since we're going for free music, we might be eventually limited to people who want to help the mod, which in turn limits exactly how many countries we can represent.

just follow standard international copyright?

So has anybody made any progress on finding free music we can use for the mod?

If you need any music for diplomacy screens or anything, Id be happy to help.

That would be awesome! :)

cool. what civs need music, ill try to make some.

erm.. at this stage, print a list of nations and throw some darts at them :D

Welcome aboard FMPBeats :beer:

...Wait.

Why are we talking all pop music?

This seems horribly inconsistent with Civ up to now. For most of the Civs in the original game, the music starts out as folk music and switches to art music the moment that Civ reaches the appropriate era. Why should we switch back to folk music? Why not stick with art music and throw some Cage, Glass, Pärt, etc in there?

The biggest reason is I've never heard of any of those artists you mentioned. ;)

In truth, however, we are no longer talking about Pop music. I mentioned the songs I did at the beginning because they do give an accurate assessment of the state of things in the post-modern era; it isn't because they were popular. With copyright being too big an issue, I don't think any of us really has much of a plan of action, except to scrounge together some world music that is free.

John Cage, Philip Glass, and Arvo Pärt are arguably the three biggest art music composers alive today. :)

But I realise that the fact that they're still alive means their music can't be public domain yet; the best one could hope for on an art music front is compositions from the 20's and 30's (which is not necessarily a bad idea, and could still apply more or less).

An alternative is to look at stock music websites and buy songs off of there (though one would need to read very carefully the applicable legal documents). They're usually less than $10 a song, and surely a few people involved in this mod would be willing to donate a little cash for a sweet soundtrack. :)

when war gets declared there should be a heavy rock song playing.

I seriously don't think paying for music is going to be a feasible option. We'd be better off finding public domain works that are applicable (and that's going to mean no heavy rock - not a particularly constructive comment anyway ;)).

when war gets declared there should be a heavy rock song playing.

"we don't need no water let the mother. .. .. .. .er burn..."

:vomit:

I seriously don't think paying for music is going to be a feasible option. We'd be better off finding public domain works that are applicable (and that's going to mean no heavy rock - not a particularly constructive comment anyway ;)).

lol, hard rock doesn't really seem to fit Civilization anyways ;)

That winking smilie had better mean you're being sarcastic. For that matter, I hate that smilie for how it's been horribly abused for so many non-sarcastic posts.

That winking smilie had better mean you're being sarcastic. For that matter, I hate that smilie for how it's been horribly abused for so many non-sarcastic posts.

No, sorry for the misunderstanding, I really really think that Civilizations music track should be kept to classical and such (and this post isn't sarcastic either, to prove it I'll show what would happen to me if Hard Rock were added to civ -> :gripe:)


(I've always wanted to use that smiley :D)