Welcome to the Free Music Archive (Beta)

Stealing Orchestra have been amazingly generous contributors to the free music world for a decade. The orchestra has provided a prolific free netlabel (also at Free Music Archive) featuring their work and the works of fellow Portuguese bands.

In 2011, Stealing Orchestra released their concept album DELIVERANCE, containing nine new tracks and celebrating the 10th anniversary of the band's netlabel You Are Not Stealing Records and 13 years of making albums together. [press release]

Now Stealing Orchestra is celebrating their 15th birthday and are giving digital versions of all of their albums as gifts to the world, including DELIVERANCE.

Happy birthday, Stealing Orchestra, and thank you so much!

A new lawsuit being filed today aims to have "Happy Birthday From You" given its rightful place in the public domain. As Eriq Gardner writes for the Hollywood Reporter, the film company Good Morning to You Productions Corp. is working on a documentary about the birthday song, and has filed a suit on behalf of all those who have paid for the rights to use it.

As we follow the case closely, you can always check out our Free Birthday Song Repository of over 140 free birthday songs that are licensed Creative Commons Attribution, and watch a video we produced of birthday song alternatives used in Film and Television. 

The newly released Artifacts/yclept 2-disc compilation Necroscopix (1970-1981) is a simple documentary survey of a very particular time and place; a sliver of a local culture — made in imitation of, or perhaps as a salute to the work of musicologist, Dick Spottswood, one of our heroes. The best stories can’t be told in this amount of space, but here’s an outline.

“...in Richmond, or in any Southern city for that matter, you do see types now and then which depart from the norm. The South is full of eccentric characters; it still fosters individuality. And the most individualistic are of course from the land, from the out of the way places.” 

 — Henry Miller,
“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” (1945)

The oddest of us were, to be sure, not from the Big City, but while many here came from places like Boones Mill, Roanoke, Martinsville, Clarksville and Culpeper in Virginia, and Winston-Salem and Greensboro in North Carolina, nearly half came from the D.C. suburbs, all converging on the urban scene around the art school at Virginia Commonwealth University in the late 1960’s.

And, if the South is indeed full of “eccentric characters,” what is art school, if not a universally potent magnet for creative misfits? There isn’t a person on these two discs who ever intended to be what the Japanese call a “salary man,” and though most succeeded in that intention, some inevitably succumbed, while more than a few died resisting in their own way (see the list, please) — and others just disappeared.

Richmond is less than 100 miles from Our Nation’s Capital, which in pre-digital days was still worlds away from the major centers of the Counter Culture on the West Coast and in NYC, and that remove forced us to interpret and synthesize a take on the zeitgeist that was uniquely our own.

Cricket and bird songs, ice clinking in glasses, block parties, kids in the sprinkler, ice cream truck jingles, wind against paper kites, "cloop" sounds in the creek, bicycle chains, and all those other musical sounds of summer have their places in our hearts. There is still space for new sounds of summer days, and the Free Music Archive is here for your summer soundtrack. Here's one I put together for a summer evening party featuring 18 tracks across the spectrum of genres. Let's hear yours!