Open Letter


October 8, 2013

Greetings to all my fellow liberty-loving artists!

What does open-source art look like? Well, first, let me tell you a story:

A guitar-wielding singer, song-writer in Texas is inspired to take a bunch of old country/folk songs (as well as a couple 70s Jesus-rock songs that very few people have ever heard) and re-write the lyrics, in order to get his political, pro-freedom points across.

Then he MCs and performs at an open-mic night for several months at a local freedom-incubating book store and gets some of his tunes recorded live. The rest of them he digitally records in his makeshift recording studio (i.e. bedroom). With the help of the Audacity software, that he downloads for free from the Internet, he is able to edit his recordings, convert them into MP3 files and voilà, he now has a CD to burn!

But no CD is complete without some eye-catching cover art. So he takes a picture with his smart phone of the freeway right outside his office and has a graphics artist turn it into a killer CD insert.

Now all, he has to do, is burn, label and hand out his CD to all his family, friends, neighbors and associates, which he does with the hope of educating the minds of all those within his immediate sphere of influence.

He also snail-mails copies of his CD to every Internet radio talk show host and their guests, who have inspired his work. (There are many of these people, who for years have been tirelessly doing their part to educate the masses as to what is really going on in our world.)

One radio show host in Hawaii, Michael Rivero sends an e-mail saying, “I really like your stuff. May I use some of your tunes as bumper music on my radio program?” He also invites the singer, song-witer on his program (1/21/2013) to showcase some of his tunes and says, “You need to get your CD to market.”

But our singer, song-writer is so busy keeping his business afloat (he is a self-employed healthcare practitioner), that he never gets the CD-to-market project off the ground. However, he is honored to have his songs used as bumper music on Michael's show.

Then one day a web designer sends an e-mail asking, “Hey, is that you singing those songs on the What Really Happened radio show? May I upload one of your songs to the Politics section of my website? By the way, where is your website? Do you have a YouTube channel?” To which the singer, song-writer says, “Yes, it's me.” and “Yes, you may! However, I have neither a website, nor a YouTube channel. But would you upload all the songs from my CD to your website, so that the whole world can download them for free?” And the web designer says, “Sure! But let's do more, than that! Let's also upload the lyrics and chords to every song!”

So HERE they are, folks! Thanks to the generous efforts of this webmaster, now you can listen to all these songs absolutey free! And you also can:

  • e-mail the link to the Songs page to all of your family, friends neighbors and associates;
  • link to your favorite songs via your Facebook and Twitter;
  • download the songs and e-mail them to those, who need to hear them;
  • upload the songs to your YouTube channel.

But THERE's MORE! And this is what open-source art looks like: Because I have made all this material part of the public domain, artists like you can take this work to the next level. For example, you can:

  • make videos for the songs and upload them to your web site, YouTube channel, etc.;
  • use your favorite audio-editing software to add more tracks to the songs (i.e. vocal harmonies, more instrumentation, etc.) and distribute them to the world;
  • go into a studio and completely re-make the songs and distribute them to the world;
  • Got a band? Play these songs live!
  • Learn these songs and play them at your local open mic!

So have fun! Entertain, educate, encourage and inspire the world for the cause of freedom!

Sincerely,

    Tom Darilek