Loca Records // Mission

The major record labels believe that music is a product to be squeezed of every last vestige of profit.

In contrast, LOCA believes that creativity requires that musicians reappropriate and reinterpret music and sounds to enable them to create truly innovative music.

LOCA is releasing music under so-called copyleft, a license that enables music writers to develop music collaboratively and equitably and then release it into the commons.

We are now using a Creative Commons licence for releases, although we earlier had a go at writing a LOCA Public License, a derivative of the GNU Public License (GPL).

Loca receives money from selling CDs and Records. Following the example of Free/Libre and Open Source GNU/LINUX distributors, this money is reinvested in new talent and to encourage more experimentation. There are two types of releases:

i . Music CDs - These are the CDs you buy in the shops. With LOCA releases you are free to copy and resell and sample and resample etc.

ii . Music/Data CDs - These contain both the music and a hidden computer readable area that will hold the samples and music tracks we used to make up the songs.

We believe that musicans are mad to sign away their rights over their music. As we release copyleft, LOCA artists can *always* use their work in any way they wish as long as it abides by copyleft principles.

Originally copyright was intended to give artists and writers an income from their works and to promote 'progress' for a period of 14 years (renewable to 28 years), but now it has been hijacked by multinational media corporations who actively lobby to make rights in copyright law last forever.

LOCA believes that without the ability to use works in radically new ways we lose our rights to free public debate and expression and control over our lives. If we are unable to criticise, reuse, sample and deconstruct we will lose a vital part of our freedoms.

We hope that more musicans will wish to sign to LOCA and use the Creative Commons licence or the LOCA Public License for release.

If you are interested we would be very interested in hearing your music (see the contacts link for more info). However we only release electronica and post-rock.

At the moment we have not found any software that is sophisticated and powerful enough for our needs. We currently use Apple Mac OS X and LOGIC so if anybody can help us out with this please email us. We are, however, experimenting with GNU/Linux and intend to see what we can produce with the tools available.

5. I understand the music is released open-source but is the music written in an open source way?

The music is created in a variety of different ways by the different artists. The most democratic and open is the project known as ML. This is an experimental collective that tries to apply open-source methods to music writing itself.

For instance ML is currently trying to get a Soundforge-type system up and running (Musicforge) that allows the music to be selectively worked on, forked and improved by a number of different collaborators. This will mean that a track is never actually *finished* but will continue to be changed and improved and only interim versions of the music will be released — although you can always download the nightly builds of the music.