Sarah (Creative Commons) Foster Releases a CD under CC

Sarah Elizabeth Foster is a 26-year old musician from Houston, Texas.
She lives in New York today, which totally makes sense, as this is the place to be for any cool musician, composer, writer, artist…

I met her first at the 6th anniversary of Creative Commons, in December 2008. She performed there, as she has just released her first album under CC license. Her debut album, Gardening from the Ground Up Part 1, can be downloaded via her own website.

I talked with Sarah Foster one more time, and what really impressed me is her devotion to music, and to spreading the word about Creative Commons. It is not rare to see a musician who is creative (I’ve blogged about one of them, who I personally know), but it is rare to see a musician who is at the same time creative, charming, smart, and enjoys what he or she’s doing.

Sarah enjoys what she is doing; she enjoys composing, and enjoys just living here life, where great things happen.

But she does something more, or else I wouldn’t have written about her:

She understands how important it is to not only create culture, but share it, allow others to share, and remix, and transform in any form and shape that makes it suitable for individuals. She is the opposite of the cliche, and one of the first musicians to actually be on the cutting edge of technology.

Sarah does it all – she has her own label (Studio Sarah Records), uses green products, donates 1 %R of her album sales (not profit, but sales) to “1 % for the Planet Foundation”, masters her blog, manages profiles in facebook, myspace, twitter, Linkedin, and others.

I like Sarah, and I like her music.
She’s full with positive energy, and that’s rare. She creates music, and I admire people who do that. But she does it in a way, which is beyond explanation, with passion and devotion, which is unique.
People like her make a difference.
I wish her good luck in the coming performances in New York and the surrounding states. Listen to her music, spread the word around, join her fans at Facebook or MySpace.

Sarah uses CC BY-NC-SA as her license; I asked her why, and here’s what she responded:

I thought it made perfect sense to allow people to remix the music non-commercially.
The benefits outweigh the risks [of my music being misused]; artists will make beautiful, interesting, original works from my original work. It fascinates and flatters me when I think of someone wanting to use what I’ve created to create something themselves.
And I hope if the remixers out there want to do something commercial with what they’ve done, they will contact me and we can make that happen. As for attribution, I think that the original artist should be credited, and share-alike will mean the remixes can continue to be remixed.

Nothing more to say, except that we see a bright, and a good young woman, sure of herself, and sure of the good in other artists that live out there. She may face hard times, but the important thing is that she doesn’t seem like someone ready to give up, when confronted with an obstacle.