The NYTimes magazine has a great profile on musician Jonathan Coulten, who will also be interviewed by AZ contributor Roy Walter for our CS Music coverage.

Jonathan Coulten is an excellent person to include in our reporting, as he's really put the crowd to work into many aspects aspects of his creative processes. He's got CS'd guitar solos, fan-made music videos, and fan/audience poll-driven touring plans!

Here's an interesting bit of info from 901am.com:

MixerCast announced that it has signed licensing deals with known content providers to allow its users to legally combine professionally-produced videos, music and images with their own content and hyper-syndicate the rich media mashups on the Internet. Instead of broadcasting pre-packaged channels of content through a traditional media network model, MixerCast makes it easy for consumers to create, distribute and remix content from a variety of sources by using a rich set of editing and publishing tools, ad-infused and product- placement-ready templates, and open access to a large library of studio content. Users can monetize their creative work by proactively adding advertising into their MixerCast content packages as they virally spread across the web, which are then tracked by a robust set of built-in measurement systems.

“With the debut of MixerCast, people now have an easy way to fuse their own content with legal studio content and create custom Web channels, movies, music videos, photo galleries or personal RSS feeds. It’s like having your own personal broadcast station with access to high-quality licensed content so you can create context and a much richer experience,” said Jennifer Cooper, MixerCast CEO, who recently left Yahoo! to co-found and lead the company. “Our vision is to drive the next big wave of syndicated content and advertising on the Web. It’s no longer about simply serving up ads based on search keywords. With MixerCast, highly-engaged users mix, monetize and network their interactive productions. Users can also include licensed, branded content when they share or post their Mixercasts via email, their favorite sites or blogs.”

What do you think of this form of content syndication and networked "interactive productions"? Does this apply to our considerations for CS film distribution?

Lev Manovich has an interesting piece on our 'remix era' posted at RemixTheory.net. He doesn't present a clear vision for what will come next, but he does address the way that remixes and mashups have extended, and been applied to, a broader set of cultural practices including: visual projects, software, and literary texts.

Well, after re-posting two recent Wired entries on collaborative music sites Splice and YourSpins, I scrolled a bit further down the wired music blog page to discover that they've also done brief entries on many other sites that I think are worth covering for our AZ music feature, including: NINJAM, Mix2r, JamGlue, Indaba, and eJamming.

I think we should do some further investigation and into each of these sites for AZ. Let me know if you're interested in doing a profile piece on any of them.

If you're looking for a music collaboration community that lets you get your hands dirty creating and remixing music without you having to know any audio editing software, Splice is a good way to go.

Splice

This one combines a Flash-based mixer, track library, and online social network that's similar to what JamGlue offers, although its mixer can take BPM into account, which gives you way more mixing and remixing options than JamGlue. As with that site, uploaded sounds can be embedded on pages and blogs a la YouTube, but all tracks and projects are visible to all other users and the audio quality is compressed, so pro users should try something else. To find out more, watch the site's helpful video demo.

Who it's for: Those with interest in making and mixing music in a MySpace-like environment.

Requirements: None.

Source: Wired

For the budding remixer who is raring to go, and wants to create a professional-sounding remix of a song by a famous artist in a matter of minutes, YourSpins is the way to go.

YourSpins

What it does: First, you select an artist (ColdPlay, Moby, etc.), then you select a track. After the intuitive homegrown remixing interface loads, you're ready to make your first remix -- just like that. This site requires zero knowledge of music creation, which can be a good thing. Anyone can use this one, and when you're done, you get to post your own customized remix on your blog or even use it as a ringtone. However, you can't upload your own audio tracks to the compositions, and the selection of remixable tracks is a bit limited.

Who it's for: Anyone who wants to create a decent-sounding remix of a famous song with no prior knowledge.

Requirements: None.

Source: Wired

Here's a recent post on open source cinema by Angela Watercutter from Wired.com:

With all the recent buzz about the collabo of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino for Grindhouse (if you haven’t seen it yet, go now, we’ll wait), I got to thinking about collaboration and how in it’s own way Grindhouse is actually kind of a remix of movies and styles: two directors with two very different films, trailers from even more eclectic/random sources, a guy humping Thanksgiving dinner, a stuntwoman playing a stuntwoman and a lot of ass-kickery all mixed into an homage to '60s and '70s cinema that is kind of about the quality of that very genre of cinema. It’s all so very meta. And it got me thinking, has anyone ever remixed their film? Sure, people take films and mix them with other source material. But has anyone ever started by open sourcing their film with the intent of putting out the remix as the final product? A quick Google search lead to some kids at NYU who encouraged people to take the blessed geek trilogies and remix them into 5-8 minute short parodies, but better still I found Open Source Cinema. Created by director Brett Gaylor it’s a “documentary project to create a feature film about copyright in the digital age” according to the manifesto. What Gaylor has done is conduct interviews with remix icons like Lawrence Lessig, Bonde do Role and Negativland’s Mark Hosler amongst many others and is inviting pretty much anyone to remix his material and/or add their own. He’s even wiki’d the film’s script. The docu he (and maybe even you!) is making is tentatively titled Basement Tapes and set to be released in March 2008. It’s being co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and EyesteelFilm. And, of course, Gaylor’s working with Creative Commons. If that wasn’t enough, he appropriated a (in)famous Banksy image for the project’s logo. Now that’s meta.

Read the original article (complete with lots of embedded links) here

Hey all,

Here's a quick & fast update from the Culture corner here at AZ. After a great chat with Jay Rosen on Friday, we've decided to reign in our coverage and focus focus on two key topic areas:

• Crowdsourced Film
• Crowdsourced Music

I'm glad to see that Jeff Howe and Ruslan Kulski are on board to work on film coverage. Ruslan's been busy gathering information and doing some initial writing on the subject - and I'm sure there will be much more to come!

On the music front, David Cohn and I were exchanging a few ideas earlier in the week that have pointed us toward a few interesting sites that interpret crowdsourcing the creation, promotion, and distribution of music. We'll be putting together a topic page over the next few days and I'm hoping to get some contributors rolling on some assignments as soon as we've got our nice new topic pages decorated with some appropriate text, key links, and upcoming plans.

CP music & culture writer/editor Angela Pacienza will also be working with our emerging team as our culture crew begins to consolidate its efforts on some initial tasks. Time permitting, we may also extend our reach to include a collaborative concentration on Current TV with Media & Publishing Editor Michele McLellan...pending a bit of further inquiry into how effectively Current TV have put their crowdsourcing plans into action.

Our strategic outreach work continues too - as I've put out a call for culture contributors to AZ over at the excellent crowdsourcing news site NowPublic.com. Founder Michael Tippett is behind our efforts and site editor Mark Schneider is eager to see where we can take this cross-collaboration. With our 900+ contributors and NP's growing international roster of 80,000+ members, we're bound to find some points of shared interest. Looking forward to see what comes from it!

Please don't hesitate to contact me jarrett.newassignment@gmail.com if you're interested in getting on board - or if you've got ideas for stories within either of the admittedly large topic areas we'll be covering.

More soon!

JM

I just came across this over at NowPublic.com:

Can open source methodology be applied to film production? Yes, says UK filmmaker and author, Matt Hanson, whose own project, 'A Swarm of Angels', is attempting to "crowdsource" the funding, production, and distribution of a $1.9+ million dollar movie.

Read more here: ‘A Swarm of Angels’ crowdsourcing film production

Welcome to the Culture section of AZ.

I will be guiding & editing AZ's culture stories on webTV, film, art, funding, music, and whatever else we dig up in these next few weeks. There are some fascinating stories to cover and I hope you'll get involved.

For my part, I've been working as an editor, writer, and new media producer with CBC television, radio, and web (more details are up on my bio page), and I'm currently a culture editor over at the amazing crowdpowered media site NowPublic.com. I also write regularly on my own blog, Culturite, about many of the topics we're going to be covering here at AZ. Suffice it to say, I'm very interested in exploring the incarnations and implications of crowdsourced culture.

I'd like for this section to focus on several key ideas and potential AZ stories - and I'm open to your thoughts and ideas about where we should take them:

• CurrentTV
• Crowdsourced Film
• Crowdfunding
• Crowdpowered Art
• Miranda July's project: "Learning to Love You More"

Are you involved in any of these projects? Have you worked for, or contributed to, CurrentTV? Do you have first-hand experience as a cultural creator (artist, filmmaker, online video producer), or as part of an arts organization trying to get a crowdfunding project off the ground? I'd like for us to cover these topics through a a blend of: interviews with key people, first-hand accounts of experience with these topics, and researched features on how these topics are developing and evolving.

And...although Sellaband is already being covered by Jeffrey Sykes , I think there is still some ground for us to cover in the area of crowdsourced music . I'm particularly interested in looking at some emergent music/web 2.0 hybrids like the revenue-sharing music site AmieStreet.com and the self-described "hip-hop 2.0" site RapSpace.tv .

How are these sites changing the way a crowdpowered 2.0 community of users interacts with content? Who is getting involved in these sites and who are they being marketed to? What kind of content is most valued on the site and how does the crowd drive its success?

More generally, and perhaps somewhat philosophically, I'm also interested in the 'experiential' aspects of crowdsourced culture, both from the perspectives of artists and of the public. In parallel to our nascent AZ process of producing 'crowdsourced journalism' which, will be self-documented and well blogged about ), I'd like for us to consider what the experience of actually making this new kinds of art is like. How is it similar or different to other forms of artistic collaboration?

What new forms and ideas could emerge from engaging with art and culture in this way? Are there dangers of these projects being co-opted or (mis)guided by outside interests, corporate or otherwise?

All of this and a whole lot more, I'm sure.

Interested in being involved? Please get in touch. I'm at jarrett.newassignment@gmail.com

I look forward to working with you.

Best,
JM