I still say that the bottom dropping out of advertising revenues at the end of the dot-com ‘bubble’ was the best thing to ever happen to Wired Magazine. It gave them a kick up the ass and forced them to go back to producing material that was both relevant and interesting to their readers.

For example, before christmas they gave away a CD with every copy of their magazine. The CD was filled with tracks from artists like David Byrne, the Beastie Boys and Le Tigre. Nothing unusual there - magazines give away CDs of music all the time. The major difference being that this was all music licensed under a Creative Commons license. Titled “The Wired CD – Rip. Mix. Sample. Mash. Share.”, they (the artists and Wired) not only allowed people to do whatever they wanted with these tunes, they positively encouraged it. As part of this encouragement, Wired ran a competition where people would send in their mixes of the songs on this CD and the best ones would be put on another Wired cover CD, which they are going to title “The Wired CD – Ripped. Mixed. Sampled. Mashed. Shared.” (which is such a fantastic idea, it actually sends shivers down my spine).

Well, the winners were announced, and some of them are really good. I’ve got the original CD in my pc in work (although it barely touched, what with the amount of Philip Glass I end up playing during work) and it’s impressive to listen to the amount of variation, epsecially when you consider that they’re all coming from the same set of source tracks.

A remarkable response to the “sampling is not creating” argument.