The “Creative Commons Magnatune Lisa Debenedictis Remix Contest” is fully under way at Mixter.

The 10 winning tracks (up to two winners allowed per contestant) are going to be released as a remix compilation on Magnatune so ever winner will get signed as an official artist and get royalties. It’ s probably not going to be a WHOLE lot of money because John’s still taking 50% off the top and everybody sampled on the album will get their license royalty. A total guesstimate on my part says if you have two remixes on the album you’ll probably end up seeing around $1.50 per $10 sale/license. (I could be off by about $1.50 give or take so don’t go by what I say.)

People who actually read the rules to these things (it takes all kinds I guess) can find them here.

Chalk this one up to “hey we’re all still learning about this stuff”: because the Sampling licenses specifically forbid using derived works for advertising and because Magnatune makes fully half of it’s money through licensing to film/tv productions of all kinds the (tough) decision was made to exclude all material on CC Mixter from the available sample pool for the contest. This one is fixable in the long term but the contest had to get off the ground in the short term so there it is.

To mitigate some of that nonesense it’s worth noting that entire Magnatune catalog is available for sampling (>1700 tracks of music) as high quality MP3s and to make things easier I’ve cut over 400 ACIDized loops and labeled them all by artist-bpm. A couple of the artists also made their studio tracks available and we’ve posted those as uncompressed WAVs.

We also spent a fair amount of energy putting ALL the samples onto one page to make it easy to browse, preview and download the whole thing. All that can be found here:

http://ccmixter.org/contests/magnatune/loops