Back when we tried this the first time with Netizen Empowerment Federation, it was primarily me, Stephen, Ryno, and to a certain extent Josiah. Kevie was involved some too on the sports side and Walt and I talked a lot on the tech side.

Honestly, I am not sure how relevant that is to the decision I made this morning, but I already had the links there and for anyone that is not familiar with TINT, it’s an interesting piece of free culture history. As far as I am aware, it is still the only free culture themed sports podcast! I did delete a couple of paragraphs though. I’m trying not to be a rambley mess. Not a mess because I am sad mind you, just a mess because I have ADHD and this is how my brain is.

Now that I have sufficiently buried the lead…I am stepping down as head of Friends of CC Music Global.

…and will be taking over as head of Friends of CC Music North America. For now, I expect this to mean US and Canada though I could be convinced otherwise.*

In practice, probably not a lot will change, except I’ll stop inviting folks to the meetings unless there is some specific thing we want to be global (a little more on that below).

What this will allow us to do is actually focus on a set of circumstances. I really still think the CC Community is too fractured, but right now we just don’t have the resources to fix that.

But the US is huge and it doesn’t rule out working with other musicians. I know Ryno has been trying to get Louis Lingg and the Bombs to come stateside and that is something Friends of CC Music NA can help with.

Friends of CC Music NA will be dedicated to helping netlabels, musicians, and fans in the good ol’ US of A and Canada. But take blocSonic for example. There are musicians from Crimea, Japan, Canada, Kazahkstan, Spain, France, UK, and the Philippines (off the top of my head) on the label. So, through blocSonic, we’ll be promoting all of those artists.

At some level, we’re outsourcing the internationalization, but Bandcamp is here. ccMixter is here. Netlabel Day is here. CC HQ is here. Those are all things that big resources to everyone in CC. Ideally, we will get some Europeans to interface with European-based organizations like Dogmazic, Jamendo, and FMA/Tribe of Noise.

I still think we need to step up the Spanish game. The USA has more Spanish speakers than Spain.

At some point, I would like to get someone to actually take over and run FCCM NA and I can return to global…or maybe someone else takes over global, but for now we need to stop thinking about the best things to do and just do some stuff. It’s been a year. It’s getting silly.

The hope here is that we can be a template of sorts for other regional organizations, whether they be sub-regions, countries, cities, provinces, whatever.

The Friends of CC Music YouTube and PeerTube are still open to others, particularly YouTube as they have a way to deal with organizations that I don’t think PeerTube has. Still, I don’t necessarily mind giving that password to someone if they want to do something.

Things that still need to be decided

1. What do we do with the website? We’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with regions for a while. For now, I think we’ll probably just leave it, but if someone wants to get involved and help us regionalize, that’d be super.
2. What to do with CC CMA. I think maybe we could bring it back as NA-only and build some momentum. How we deal with the Netlabel situation is one of the big questions but also do we want to do something for 2025 or just bring it back for 2026.
3. What to do with Netlabel Week events. FC Stoffel had suggested he’d be interested in helping out with the conference. I think probably we’ll keep the Cinco de Mayo weekend as a big get-together as it’s on a bunch of folks calendars, but we’ll plan something specific for the NA space. Maybe all that means is timezones. I’m not sure. Remember, this is the things that still need to be decided section.

* As fans of Music Manumit will know, I’m a big geography fan. I won my school geography bowl in 8th grade, was a finalist in 6th grade and went to regionals in 5th grade. I’m kinda a big deal (no, clearly not). In any case, continents are complicated. Technically, Reykjavik is in North America but having an org that included the Icelandic capital in NA and not in Europe is stupid. Including Mexico though could make some sense. Perhaps if we get a strong Spanish-speaking contingent we’ll move that direction, but I think it would make more sense for someone to start Friends of CC Music Latin America (or various divisions there-of).

I want to live you with the one true name of the body of water south of the USA.