Mike Linksvayer : Bob Ostertag

Today avant garde musician Bob Ostertag released digital downloads of all of his recordings that he holds the rights to under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

For Ostertag this is primarily a political decision:

Bob Ostertag

This will make my music far more accessible to people around the globe, but my principal interest is not in music distribution per se, but in the free exchange of information and ideas. "Free" exchange is of course a tricky concept; more precisely, I mean the exchange of ideas that is not regulated, taxed, and ultimately controlled by some of the world's most powerful corporations.

And:

"Intellectual property rights" have become so absurdly swollen that they now constitute a smokescreen hiding a corporate power grab on a scale rivaling the great robber barons of the nineteenth century. Instead of grabbing land or oil, today's corporate crooks are seizing control of culture.

His misgivings have to do not with money but with the way that the internet changes the meaning of music:

I do have serious reservations about this step, however, but they have nothing to do with money. My music is made for sustained, concentrated listening. This kind of listening is increasingly rare in our busy, caffeine-driven, media-drenched, networked world I suspect it is even rarer for music that was downloaded for free, broken up and shuffled through fleeting "playlists," and not objectified in an object that one can hold in one's hand, file on the shelf, or give to a friend.