Berklee College of Music is offering free music lessons online. The "Berklee Shares" campaign will invite people to download and share music lessons and interviews from Berklee faculty and alumni contained in MP3s, QuickTime movies, and PDF files. The Berklee Shares program is designed to expand educational opportunities to musicians around the globe, and inform musicians of the educational opportunities made possible via new online technology.

The music lessons will be available for free download from the Berkleeshares.com Web site, and via a growing network of music-related affiliate and partner Web sites in the future. Over 70 individual lessons will be available at launch, with more to come in the future. Berklee Shares Music Lessons are offered in many areas of interest to musicians, including instrument performance, music production and technology, songwriting and arranging, music business and careers, and music education and music improvisation.

The Berklee Shares lessons will also be made available on digital file sharing networks, including Gnutella and FreeNet sites. We encourage people to share our lessons with other musicians. We believe that, if used to its full potential, file sharing networks are an effective way to distribute meaningful educational content to a global audience. The very same P2P file sharing technology that is currently used for entertainment can also be used to gain knowledge and further your career.

File sharing across digital networks represents an extraordinary opportunity for artists to promote and distribute their work. We believe that these new technologies will, in the long run, help musicians and writers promote and legitimately distribute their works over digital networks and help grow the music business. While Berklee in no way approves of stealing copyrighted music online via file sharing networks, we also do not believe that file sharing is wrong. On the contrary, it offers new opportunities for musicians to learn, and to promote and distribute their work.

Numerous studies and reports indicate that file sharing may be a viable form of promotion for recorded music, and a preferred form of marketing for independent labels and artists seeking to establish an audience for their music. Berklee believes that, in the future, online distribution will be a major aspect of how music is made available to audiences, and the immediacy of the online experience provides an important new format for music education.

At Berklee, it is our mission to educate, train, and develop students to excel in music as a career. We believe digital networks are a development that will have a significant impact on the future of music and music education. We have decided to make music lessons from our faculty available for free at Berkleeshares.com, under a Creative Commons license (www.creativecommons.org), to encourage the positive exploration of alternatives in content licensing and distribution.

These Berklee music lessons are intended to be freely distributed and shared among musicians via the Internet, in order to reach a wide audience of students across the globe. Like MIT's Open Courseware Initiative (ocw.mit.edu), Berklee is committed to providing music education that is widely available to the music community around the world.

For more information, please contact us.