Brad Turcotte not to be confused with Brad Turcotte (International Director of Marketing at Big Machine Records) performing under the name Brad Sucks, is a musician from Ottawa

Ottawa

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...

, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

. Turcotte released his albums under a copyleft

Copyleft

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...

 license. Promoting his music through sites such as Magnatune

Magnatune

Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003 by John Buckman, then-CEO of e-mail software company Lyris. It aims at treating both its musicians and its customers fairly—its tagline is "We are not evil"...

 and ccMixter

CcMixter

ccMixter.org is a community music site that promotes remix culture and makes samples, remixes, and a cappella tracks licensed under Creative Commons available for download and re-use in creative works. Visitors are able to listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in a variety of ways...

, as well as MySpace

MySpace

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....

 and Podsafe

Podsafe

Podsafe is a term created in the podcasting community to refer to any work which, through its licensing, specifically allows the use of the work in podcasting, regardless of restrictions the same work might have in other realms...

, he has used micropatronage to profit from his work without restricting the freedom to share and modify it.

Turcotte received free publicity through blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

s and interviews in free culture magazines. His first full CD, I Don't Know What I'm Doing

I Don't Know What I'm Doing

I Don't Know What I'm Doing was released independently and without charge online on December 19, 2003, in mp3 form. It was released on Compact Disc on June 7, 2005, through both Magnatune and a limited "professional" printing from his own website with an extended version of the final track.One of...

, was released both through Magnatune and a limited "professional" printing from his own website.

Early career

Turcotte opened his website in 2002 with the intention of producing "open source music". His self-produced single, Brad Sucks One, included the audio source files used to create the finished files, and later he posted these source files to his website along with the mp3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

s.

I Don't Know What I'm Doing (2003)

I Don't Know What I'm Doing was released independently and without charge online on the 19th of December 2003 in mp3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 form. It was also released in CD form on the 7th of June 2005 through both Magnatune

Magnatune

Magnatune is an American independent record label based in Berkeley, California, founded in spring 2003 by John Buckman, then-CEO of e-mail software company Lyris. It aims at treating both its musicians and its customers fairly—its tagline is "We are not evil"...

 and a limited "professional" printing from his own website with an extended version of the final track.

Out of It (2008)

Turcotte's second album, Out of It, was released on 8 September 2008.

Other work

Turcotte also runs the website stripcreator.com, which allows participants to create their own talking-head webcomic

Webcomic

Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....

s. He is also the creator of in4mador, an aggregator of user-submitted "interesting" links.
He is now working on some demos, and we may see the release of a new album.

External links

• Official website
• Brad Sucks on Jamendo.com
• Interview with Brad Sucks at Flak Magazine
  Flak Magazine
  Flak Magazine was a pioneering American online magazine, founded in 1998. The chief editor is James Norton, the managing editor is Joey Rubin. , it reported over 250,000 unique visitors monthly. In 2008, Flak suspended publication....
  
  
• Article in the Ottawa Citizen
• Article in the Silicon Valley Business Journal Article in Oricon Style
• Brad Sucks Interview where he speaks about the future of Open Source music
• Brad Sucks, the open source one-man-band from Red Hat Magazine