Severed Fifth is a San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

 band founded by Jono Bacon

Jono Bacon

Jono Bacon is a community manager, writer, musician and software developer, originally from the United Kingdom, but now based in California...

 and featuring Defiance

Defiance (band)

Defiance is a thrash metal band from Oakland, California. While virtually unknown to mainstream metal and rock circles, Defiance is known as one of the classic second-tier thrash bands to come from the Bay Area thrash metal scene...

 guitarist Jim Adams

Jim Adams

Jim Adams born is an American heavy metal guitarist. His is best known for being lead guitarist for thrash metal band Defiance. Joining the band in 1986, Adams quickly became an integral member of the band, co-writing much of their material and playing on all three of their LP's, Product of...

.

The band is noted for its copyright model of distributing its music under permissive Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

 licenses, allowing the public to legally download and share music for free. Reviewer Ryan Paul of Ars Technica

Ars Technica

Ars Technica is a technology news and information website created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Ars Technica is known for its features, long articles that go...

, writing in June 2008, explained the project:
The band's first release was Denied by Reign, 2008, with eight tracks.

The group released its newest 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 Share-Alike license

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S...

.

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.

After a string of live shows and the completion of basic tracks for their full length album, Ben Gibbs decided to leave the band in April 2011. Severed Fifth conducted a search nationwide and chose Jim Walls to take over the drum duties in May 2011. The first show with Walls on drums will be June 17 in SF supporting Dublin Death Patrol (featuring Chuck Billy and Zetro Souza).