We’ve been giving our music away for free for over a year now, and been having great fun doing so. We’ve made new friends, pushed ourselves creatively, and haven’t ended up out of pocket (unlike a lot of touring signed bands).

We were doing quite well distributing MP3s on our site as a downloadable zip file, and some lossless versions of the albums via Mediafire. Then Zorlin-cc started seeding our stuff on Mininova. Mininova is/was a very popular site for picking up torrent files. Torrent files facilitate the peer to peer sharing of files, distributing the bandwidth of downloading amongst users rather than just the creators of the files. Anyway, on the 26th November Mininova was taken to court and forced to remove all the illegal content from its servers. Leaving just the legal stuff. Suddenly our albums became needles in not such a big haystack and bingo, thousands of new people discovered our music.

So peer to peer can help independent bands distribute their music, as can Jamendo, Last.FM, and begrudgingly MySpace (I say begrudgingly because I’m not sure MySpace has been particularly creative with its offering). OK, we’re not trying to make money from the Intercontinental Music Lab so we can increase downloads.

So how do you make a living out of writing and distributing music via Creative Commons licenses? We could look into it, but what would do with the cash? There are now about 30 people in the band, people who write what they want, or decide not to if they’ve got other commitments, and there’s no pressure.

I’ve got to go to bed now. Sorry if that was all a bit incoherent, I do have a cold you see.