#cc10 Featured Platform: Bad Panda Records

Each day during CC’s tenth anniversary celebration, we’ve featured a different platform that hosts CC-licensed content, ranging from music to science to education. Today, we feature a favorite of ours, Bad Panda Records.

Bad Panda is a netlabel that releases one song a week, all under CC BY-NC-SA. Bad Panda also offers CDs and LPs of many of the featured artists. Founded in 2010, Bad Panda has quickly grown into a major hub of the #ccmusic community.

We contacted Bad Panda founder Claudio and asked him a few questions. We asked him to suggest a few of his favorite Bad Panda tracks, which are listed at the end of the interview. He also put together his own #cc10 mixtape, which you can enjoy at his site.

Tell me a bit about how Bad Panda started. Was CC licensing a part of the plan from the beginning?

It started with the idea of re-imagining what could be a label in the year 2010 – building the label from the bottom up without any financial help, just using tools that internet people is building. CC licensing is definitely a part of the plan, it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Completely inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s words and by a meeting with Joi Ito in Rome around december 2009.

CC has clearly become a more viable option for musicians than it was a few years ago. Do you think artists are less reluctant to share now? Is it because people understand CC better now than they used to, or because of changes in the landscape?

It’s probably both reasons even if honestly still see some people confused at how CC works, especially here in Italy (and some speculations as well).

Do you have any stories of surprising ways in which people have reused music that was featured on Bad Panda?

Dumbo Gets Mad was in BBC’s Planet Earth, a choreographed dance somewhere in the USA, and a short featuring Possimiste.

Claudio’s favorite CC-licensed songs

Dumbo Gets Mad – Radical Leap from Dumbo Gets Mad on Vimeo.