WELCOME

Welcome to the home of Cans and Boxes, a collaborative music composition and recording project. The aim of this enterprise is to create a juxtaposition of different musical pieces created from the same initial set of lyrics or inspirational material. Teams and individuals are invited to take the base material and create their own sound compositions. The resultant pieces will then be available to compare with each other, being released as sets through Grayscale Records. All are welcome to participate. Please register your intent to participate by sending an email with your name or band/group title. There is no obligation to complete a project, but we would like to know how many people are interested.

All of the resultant songs will be Creative-Commons licensed material that can be freely shared, yet attributed to the original composers, performers, and lyricists.

Further instructions will follow; feel free to contact me with questions, or with your interest in joining the project team.

• How Do I Participate?

  Anyone can participate if you have a will to write a song, and the ability to record it. Check the main page for this month's lyrics, and get to work.

  Save your composition as an .mp3 file and email it to Scott before the end of the month. All submissions will be posted here during the next month.

  The only real rule is that you use the lyrics provided. Any genre or style is welcome. Try to remember that you are collaborating with our lyricist to create a song together.

• What do you do with the songs?

  This is a creative and collaborative musical project. We also feel this is a next step in the music industry. We will be selling the songs - individually and packaged in sets as digital downloads. People will be coming to this site to find new artists, and will be welcomed with fresh new music each month.

  As with Grayscale Records' other artists, we will be splitting up the profits. 65% of each track sale goes to the recording artist, 15% to the lyricist, and 20% stays with the label to help cover expenses and spread the word.

  If you submit a song, you are automatically included in this selling process, but you can opt out if you are participating only for fun. We will be writing checks to the artists as soon as a balance is over $20.00 US. The songs remain owned by you. No contract will take away your ownership of your work. Everything released or sold by use will be under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. As the owner, you are welcome to sell or use the work as you like.

  Yes, this is kind of a musical variation on how Threadless works.

• What if I don't want to make music?

  Then we hope that you enjoy the songs submitted here. The recording artists are widely varied in styles and technical abilities. We recommend listening through the submissions with the lyrics beside, to really take in how each artist worked their own ideas onto the words.

  The songs will not be streaming online for free for more than a month. If you like a particular recording artist, then please purchase their work. If you like a particular lyric set of songs in contrast, then please purchase the whole project. A substantial amount of the proceeds go directly back to the artists involved.

  Additionally, you can register with the website and vote on any and all of the submissions. The votings are to let the artists know how the public feels, and to let us know which songs should be bundled together for purchase later. (Any obvious vote-fraud WILL be detected and eliminated.)

• Can I submit the lyrics?

  The lyrics are obviously a very important part of this process. I work personally with the lyricists to edit and make their work accessible to the wide variety of recording artists and listeners that will be confronting their words. If you're interested in this process, send me a message about it, and we'll talk.

• How do I...?

  ...record my song? If you have questions about recording and songwriting, check out our articles. (This is a work-in-progress that we will be introducing soon.) As they grow, we will have our more experienced musicians discussing the process of home recording for you to learn from.

  ...write music to these words? Obviously, some leeway is expected with the provided lyrics, but not too much. The guideline should be that the lyrics (as originally posted) should be the same as if you were going to print them as liner notes with an album. The chorus or other lines aren't always repeated in print, and a few other minor changes, but the words, order, form, etc... should all remain.

DETAILS

The primary intention is an artistic comparison between songwriting capabilities, musicianship, and home recording.

The evolved and involved intention is a process of bringing together many different people and introducing them to new musical artists.

We will continue making these collaborations happen. Please listen to our work, find some new artists, and move the music industry in a different direction.

Soon, we will roll out a plan for purchasing your favorite songs: individually, grouped by artist, by project, or 'best of'. The money gets split immediately; 65% to the performer, 15% to the lyricist, and 20% to the label coordination from each track.