Having one too many dusty CDs taking up shelf space, I’ve decided not to buy music in physical form any more. I don’t care how many exclusive, special edition DVDs and fancy-pants packaging they dangle out there—it’s time to move past the physical disc.

By itself, that’s easy enough to do. There are plenty of places to purchase digital music out there, not least of which is the iTunes Music Store. Unfortunately, I refuse to buy music crippled by DRM that restricts the devices I use to listen to the music I have purchased.

The iTunes Music Store recently launched its iTunes Plus DRM-free music offering, but due to resistance from most of the music labels, it’s only able to offer this format for a small subset of the music it has for sale. Amazon.com’s MP3 Downloads section provides even better quality and value for money, but it’s only available in the US for now.

The first band to miss out on my money because its music is not available in DRM-free digital form is Matchbox Twenty. Their new album, ‘Exile on Mainstream’ sounds great to me, but I’ll just have to do without it until I can buy it in a format that works for me.

In related news, Radiohead is about to release its new album, ‘In Rainbows’ in DRM-free digital form, and is enabling buyers to choose for themselves how much they want to pay for the album! Sounds great, right? Sadly, the physical (‘Discbox’) version of the album contains eight tracks that the digital version does not. Sigh.

But with the pending release of their new album, Barenaked Ladies Are Me, they have slipped up a little. It seems they have produced so much new music for this album, that they are going to make different subsets available through different methods of distribution.

From the announcement email:

Order before Aug 22nd and receive as a bonus the “BNL: All New Revue (Live from the Glenn Gould Theatre)” disc FREE, which is a live acoustic version of the new album.

[The album's 13 tracks] will also be available digitally with a bonus of two tracks for purchase of the entire album. In addition, a 25 song package called Barenaked Ladies Are Me: Deluxe Edition, will be available digitally (album only). With the purchase of the Deluxe Edition, fans will be have the opportunity to obtain either two bonus tracks OR four bonus tracks for pre-ordering. Details on the digital pre-order to follow.

In addtion, a USB stick featuring 29 songs plus other special content will be released Sept 12.

Confused yet? This is more complicated than picking an edition of Windows Vista!

As a loyal fan, I want to know one thing: how do I get all the Barenaked goodness that I can without paying for most of it twice (or three times!)?

Including Canadian artists such as Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace, Dave Bidini of Rheostatics, Billy Talent, John K. Sampson of Weakerthans, Sloan, Andrew Cash, Bob Wiseman, a co-founder of Blue Rodeo, and of course the Barenaked Ladies, the CMCC aims to promote changes to music copyright law that will “protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies.”

I’m actually surprised this didn’t happen sooner. It’s great to finally see some artists from major labels speaking out against prosecution of MP3 file sharers and the tightening of controls over media that threatens to drive away paying fans.

As a great fan of the Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Our Lady Peace and Blue Rodeo, it’s especially heartening to see so many of my favourite artists working to free their music so that I can continue to support them and enjoy their work a paying fan for years to come.

As I listened to the occasionally unrecognisable reinterpretations of the six-second-long beat, including a remix of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love (sorry Jules), originally released the same year as Amen Brother, I felt a mild sense of outrage on behalf of the original creators of the beat. This feeling culminated as I learned that companies like Zero G Ltd. sold sample compilations that included the Amen Break, claiming it as their own original (and copyright protected) work. If you work in media the way I do, you might feel the same way.

But Harrison points out that The Winstons survived as a band to see their six-second creation take on this life of its own, and apparently chose to allow it to happen, such that today the riff resides in a sort of implicit state of public domain, despite being legally protected by at least two copyright claims (The Winstons and Zero G Ltd.).

As copyright protections are increasinly extended and tightened by those seeking to profit from music and other media, often the success of these companies ironically comes out of the sort of copyright flexibility exemplified by the history of the Amen Break. As this sort of flexibility is increasingly outlawed, will the creative landscape survive the imposed restriction that all work must be original work? And indeed, is any creative work truly and completely original?

Harrison sums it up beautifully in his project, and if you’ve read this far I’d encourage you to listen to it yourself, but he does borrow these very apt words from US Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski:

Over-protecting intellectual property is as harmful as under-protecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, like nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new. Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Over-protection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.

I’ve always thought Creative Commons licensing (“some rights reserved”) was a great idea, but this is the first time I’ve seriously considered its place in the work I do for a living, as opposed to the stuff I do “just for fun” (like my photos on Flickr). Perhaps our sense of accomplishment and ownership in a work—not to mention our ability to make a living by that work—need not come at the expense of others’ freedom to build upon that work.

The podcast makes great listening while driving too, but for the continual frustration of not being able to stop and note down the artists I want to check out later. Re-listening to the episodes at work is allowing me to do just that.

First on my list to check out is Christine Fellows, whose track Vertebrae really tugs at my insides.