Roughly a month ago, a study done on UK artists suggested that, although artists aren’t always experts on copyright law, they seem to gravitate towards the license by instinct.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
While this is merely a snapshot of a few British content creators, recent statistics suggest that the movement is growing.
Magnatune saw significant growth in the recent months. While dollar amounts were not disclosed, the statistics provided suggest that they saw a new peak during 2006 in terms of sales. Overall, license deals saw a 2.5x jump this year.
Traffic-wise, this year saw a jump in traffic with 20,000 unique hits per month which is close to double last year at 13,000 unique hits per month. Over the last three months, Magnatune went through over a Terabyte of bandwidth.
There was a similar story over at Jamendo, which recently surpassed 2000 albums. The trend getting there is a rather steep one. What’s even steeper is the number of reviews being written at the same time. The statistics show that there are currently well over 25000 reviews written. While the sharp increase may have died down somewhat, both album counts and reviews written are going up.
Perhaps the British study may be a sign of things to come even, if it was a small sample. With a growing number of artists using the Creative Commons License and more consumers lending an ear to the music under these licenses, it may be likely that the Creative Commons movement is building momentum.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
