Severed Fifth

Severed Fifth is a San Francisco Bay Area band founded by Jono Bacon and featuring Defiance guitarist Jim Adams.

The band is noted for its copyright model of distributing its music under permissive Creative Commons licenses, allowing the public to legally download and share music for free. Reviewer Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, writing in June 2008, explained the project:

The band's first release was Denied by Reign, 2008, with eight tracks.

The group released its second album, Nightmares By Design, on October 11, 2010. The album was released on that day via the band's website at no charge, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The group released its latest album, "Liberate", on February 3, 2012, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

History

Severed Fifth was founded in 2008 by Jono Bacon (formerly Seraphidian, Conspiracy) as a project to explore how successful a metal band could be when giving their music away and building a community around the band. The band's concept is to write, record and give away their music for free and hope that the number of fans will increase as they share the music and join an active community to promote the band.