Yahoo has recently launched a new special search section that lets you search for material that is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

I did a casual search for the term bangalore rock music and was thrilled to bits to see Phenom listed right near the top of the search results.

Why am I so thrilled about it? Well, apart from the fact that Phenom is very special to me, it is the fact that this is where my two passions – free information and music – come together.

I met Lawrence Lessig in Berlin in 2004 at the Wizards of OS 3 conference, and was hugely impressed by both the man, and his vision. It was this meeting that caused me to recommend that Phenom publish its music under a CC license, which they eventually did in December 2004, when they released their album “Unbound”.

At the time of writing this entry, Phenom has had about 2500 downloads of their songs, and the rate is not only *not* slowing, but is in fact *increasing* every month! I have heard from people all over the world who have downloaded and heard their music, and (even more thrilling) thousands of people right here in India are being exposed to Phenom’s work – about two thirds of the downloads are from Indian IP addresses. Given that very few Indian rock music albums have even crossed a couple of hundred in terms of sales, and possibly a thousand overall, this is a major achievement.

There is huge amount of interest in not only the music itself, but the *reasons* why Phenom did this (publish under a CCL). While other music groups have published their music on the internet, none (to my knowledge) have actually done so under a Creative Commons license. The closest would be Thermal and a Quarter, who published their latest album under a *modified* CCL at the same time that Phenom released their album.

It is a matter of time before the press and other influential sectors begin picking up on this concept, and when it does, I hope that it will have as much impact on the world of music as the advent of Free & Open Source Software has had on the world of software.

And when it does, I hope that it will finally bring Indian rock music out of the shadows of film and pop music, and find its deserved place in the limelight. There is an incredible amount of talent here – real, original talent. So far, the music publishers in India have been ignoring it, but it is clear that this will have to change, once more and more people get exposed to, and clamour for, more Indian Rock Music.