Project history :

BURN STATION started in the year 2003 as an open source and a non-commercial project involving the new means of net distribution avaliable in the Internet. Our main goal was to link a public familiar with music but who may not necessarily know the tools, the radios and the labels available freely and legally in the Internet. We thus invited net/fm radios and net labels to participate in open and non-commercial events for which they provide us with a list or a catalog of the files they would like to share as well as further Information or other material they deem/consider important. They could submit details about their history, their philosophy and their policy concerning copyrights .Our pragmatic goal was to enable the listeners to edit and burn their own data/audio compilations within a legal context and in a public situation.

The first phase of the project and the large interest it created, convinced us of the necessity to create a specific software to manage the database and the copying of the cdr's. Since 2003 Burn station has converted itself into a mobile self-service distributor. Set up in a van, it travels to suburban spaces such as parks and car parks, festivals, petrol station and a long etc making its files available for free public consulation. People are invited to bring their cds, to listen, to edit and to burn their own compilations, the whole process being LEGAL AND FREE OF CHARGE.

Lessons learned:

From ‘Peer to Peer' to ‘Face to Face'. This would be the sentence to resume best the impact of the burnstation project and its free distribution action. In the first 2 years of activities organised around the project we observed that personal contacts with groups or situations where an exchange was possible in a physical space is indispensable to spread out free content ideas and reach a non expert public. The possibility to upload locally files in the database made it a project in perpetual evolution. The only limit of the project is financial. On one hand because it needs more software improvement, on the other hand the coasts of the tour and the content management needs more support.

An important point regarding the BurnStation software is the fact that it has been tested, shared and further developed in the streets before being published on the net. This seems to be the best and the cruelest software testing model we could think of. So lets release software and party in the streets!