Music Thread!

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. 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 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?
 
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. :)
 
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