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Publishing your private collaboration on the music market
By default, the tracks which you share and collaborate on within wikiloops private bands are only available to the invited project participants.
Musicians who are interested in marketing their music or releasing digital or physical CDs will (hopefully) be aware that care needs to be taken not to spoil any marketing opportunities, and most importantly not to hand over their creative material and the use rights to anyone.
There are too many examples of artists who suffered from the pitfalls of "leaking" their recorded material to the public prior to the official release,
or of having signed over their marketing rights thoughtlessly and ending up noticing that they will no longer be able to benefit from their own material.
wikiloops private band spaces are safe in this regard:
Your recordings will only be available to the invited band members, and given they act responsibly, there is no need to worry about wikiloops "leaking" the tracks.
Also, wikiloops is not granted any kind of marketing or other rights on audio material which is uploaded to private bands.
The wikiloops private license (which is the default license for private band collaborations on wikiloops) merely grants wikiloops the rights needed to cover the services of the private band as offered to the invited group members.
This ensures that the music which has been created or shared via the wikiloops private band segment may later be used in any thinkable publishing and marketing scenario you and your band colleagues may want to go for.
Given all contributors agree, you may submit the audio material to digital music distribution, have it marketed by a label or sell it for any kind of other purpose without any obligation to even mention wikiloops.
Publishing your private collaborations on wikiloops
The functionality covered in this article offers a way to change individual track's access policy to be able to "publish" the track on the band's wikiloops page, where it will then become available to anyone who visits your band's page.
To be able to use this option, all active contributors of the track-to-publish need to signal their consent to let the public listen to the track for free,
and to make it available as a free download to anyone who has access to downloading from wikiloops.
The wikiloops public license (which is the default agreement for all non-band collaborations on wikiloops) is used to provide the needed legal basis for the desired changed-access policy of previously private tracks.
Again, changing any track's license model from "private" to "public" requires all contributors' explicit consent.
Please make sure to be familiar with the public license's content, or read the "Effects of granting a license"-article prior to publishing tracks on wikiloops.
The procedure of setting a previously private track to "public" as it is described below requires you to be a logged-in member who has contributed to the private-band-track in question, either by creating the track, or by having supplied a track which was then remixed to create the track in question.
If these requirements are met, you may:
The track listings of any track you are involved in show an additional hyperlink below the track's ID number in the top-right corner of the track's list-entry, offering to "Suggest Publishing", or to "Confirm Publishing" if another collaborator has started the publishing-negotiation-mode.
If you are the only contributor to the track or the last contributor whose consent was missing, the track's license will be changed immediately upon confirmation, and the track will be publicly listed on the band's page.
If there are other participants who need to give their consent, the track's publishing status is displayed as "awaiting confirmation",
and the track remains invisible to the public until all involved participants have followed the procedure and granted their consent.
To make sure your band colleagues notice your publishing suggestion and take the requested consenting-action quickly, you may want to inform them about the matter by sending a group message through the band's "Message"-tab.
help article was written by Richard Kaiser on and last edited on
wikiloops is great! I already have some toons ready when I get the audio interface.