The Daily Swarm

This email just came in from our friends in Norway:

MENTAL OVERDRIVE LAUNCH “EXCLUSIVE MUSIC” SERIES

After almost two decades in the game of electronic music, Norwegian producer Per Martinsen aka Mental Overdrive will pursue a slightly different solution for some of his forthcoming releases.

Hot on the heels of the much acclaimed 12inch single “Spooks”/“Original Material”, recently released on fellow nordmann Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp label (the track “Original Material” was also featured on the recent Sunkissed compilation on Smalltown Supersound along with a Mental Overdrive remix of 120 Days) – the brand new Mental Overdrive track “Elephantastic!” will be put up for sale in early June.

But this time we’re not talking about a regular release in the sense of vinyl, cd or digital download – the track will simply be put up for grabs on eBay – plainly auctioned off to the highest bidder – in 1 copy only.

In short it means that the master recording will straight and simple be sold to whoever sees it fit to strech their budgets a little extra in order to be the exclusive owner of a genuine Mental Overdrive recording.

More specifically, it means: If you are a dj who earn your living entertaining the masses (or your 3 closest mates), and would like to sit on your own little reportoire unavailable to others, you can now sport a genuine Mental Overdrive track in your collection. If you’re a “collector of art” of sorts, and get the giggles by owning a special little piece that no-one else can lay their ears on, you can now enjoy this genuine piece of music in your surroundings of choice (without noisy interferance from “tourist-class people”). Should you be just a nice person, who wants to keep feeding artists of your liking, you are of course welcome to place a bid, too.

This means that the only other individual on the planet able to expose the recording to the public at will – other than you – will be the original artist, at live shows and other personal public appearances.

Should you be tempted to reproduce or copy your new posession in any way, you are of course free to do so – it’s yours, though it must be stated that what you buy is the master recording of a piece of music. The non-physical copyright of the music will stay with the author, as determined under general Norwegian copyright law.

A Creative Commons license will be applied, though – the “some rights reserved” tag will be the effective copyright – i.e. you can give away as many free copies to your friends at your own dinner party or to punters at your club’s 10th anniversary, but should any copies of the recording be made available for sale or other commercial exploitation, mechanical royalties must be paid to the author or his representatives – for every copy reproduced.

The same goes for the event of bundling the master recording with publicly accessible film, tv, advertising or any other such commercial exploitation of the recording – you will then have to negotiate and pay an appropriate fee to the author or his representatives for such use.

The exception to the above is if you are a label or other commercial entity posing as private collector or art-lover. Then you cannot reproduce the recording without the artist’s written consent, and then most probably only in limited numbers on selected formats (you might just read “non digital” or “vinyl” here, if we know our artists right).

Our guarantee is that the recording will only be previewed in part – or of a listening quality inferior to that of the finished master – prior to the auction. “Elephantastic” has so far only left our offices in 25 cd-r copies (budled with the Mental Overdrive cover of Iron Maiden’s “Run to the hills”). One of these cd-r’s ended up in the hands of iDJ Magazine, who made it “recommendation of the month” in their May 2007 “electro” column. These 25 cd-r’s were produced from an mp3 file. The same mp3 file was previewed on Mental Overdrive’s MySpace page for 4 weeks in March 2007, and mailed to a small handful of people only.

The auction will open on June 1st 2007 and be open for 4 full weeks. The initial price will be based on an estimate of the total earnings per track from previous Mental Overdrive releases. Taken into consideration that this will be one single genuine master unit only, and not a serial run, it’ll basically gonna cost a tad more than a rare 12inch, should you wonder.

More detailed info and links to the eBay auction will be posted at the artist and label websites below.

Check http://www.myspace.com/mentaloverdrive and http://www.loveod.com for updates.