Political music has always been one of the most important and impact generating weapons inside the arsenal of available tools for promotion of social change within the struggle for more just and egalitarian society - with an enormous potential for political mobilization of otherwise contesting middle classes. Yet, the effort of the small-scale, politically conscious and critically oriented music bands to establish themselves as the independent actors within the contemporary reality of commercialized musical scene dominated by transnational media moguls most often becomes a struggle by itself. The notion of copyleft - a creative attempt to juxtapose copyright and disrupt power structures built around it, thus enabling the full retransformation of the existing musical communication order - becomes an important topic to consider within this scope.
This presentation focuses on the issues related with the copyleft music production in Turkey through a case study on Bandista, radical music collective with strong political and oppositional stance, which became immensely popular in Turkish political music scenery after releasing its debut album De Te Fabula Narratur online in 2009 for free under the copyleft scheme and in no time formed itself as the leading oppositional music band in Turkey.
Presentation analyzes the copyleft structure devised by Bandista, following the classical Marxist differentiation of use-value and exchange-value of commodities, and argues that the Bandista's copyleft experience emerges as an essential and in many ways revolutionary innovation tool for new music bands, offering an important empowerment strategy in the form of a two-fold liberation tactic.