Spektrem

Jesse Paul Warren, aka Spektrem, began his music career while at the University of Maryland. Though he had written and recorded music all his life, college life led him to swap his guitar for his laptop as his primary musical tool. In 2012, his first song, "In a Dream," surprisingly became a hit in his college town. He would hear it at parties and playing in people's cars, giving him motivation to make more. Rejecting the copyright model, he released his songs copyright-free. He believed that enforcing copyright on music would only hold it back. At the time, blogs and YouTube channels were being handed copyright strikes simply for trying to spread the music they loved. Jesse turned out to be right. The next year, his song "Shine" was picked up by NoCopyrightSounds, then a new YouTube channel providing music free of copyright. "Shine" became one of the most popular songs on the channel, and NCS became the most popular channel for copyright-free music on YouTube. To this day, "Shine" is viewed by many as a classic in this realm. Jesse's last song, "Don't Look Down," was released in 2016, after which he left music to work in government. In 2017, he released a compilation, "Audio Polaroids," of various unreleased songs from his time making music, woven together into a cohesive narrative. Today he lives in Burlington, VT where he runs his organization focused on democracy innovation, Democracy Creative.