Music is one of the most precious heritage human kind has. It should be shared to everybody and many times people complain about the price of music. Musopen has a mission to set free the music by proposing free recordings of the major masterpieces in classical music.
Musopen, set the music free
Musopen is a non-profit association with the mission to improve access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. Based in California, they provide free recordings but also sheet music and even textbooks to the public. No copyright restrictions. In their website you can already find many of the major composers for classical music and you can simply download the music.
You can also find a lot of information about the composer, as a mini-bio. On each composer, you can browse the available catalog by composer, performer, instrument and even time period. It is probably one of the most amazing music databases, and all public domain. Brilliant. Check their website to try and to see more about this very interesting association: https://musopen.org
How does it work?
Basically the association tries to leverage budgets in order to pay an orchestra to play music from the classicals. The composer rights, especially the ones from the classical period, have mostly passed to Public domain any way. So they just need to find the money to pay an orchestra and then release for free the recording online. Simple as that. Of course, they still need to collect enough money in order to pay the musicians. Here is a 2 hour video with one of their work around Brahms.
Musopen has a new project. It is called “Set Chopin Free”. This year it is the 164th anniversary of Chopin’s death. His music is now on Public domain and yet, everybody is buying his music as if it was copyrighted via Cd’s or music platforms such as iTunes. Here in video more details about the project.
Musopen really wants to preserve the quality and the originality of Chopin’s life work. So in this case it is about a 1080p video and 24bit 192kHz audio. At the total, people will have a great database of 245 pieces!
In order to make this happen, they gathered a dream team of fantastic talented people. And to raise the money to pay all of it, they use a platform for funds called Kickstarter. You can see all the details here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/set-chopin-free
The minimum donation is 1$, so everybody can participate. The donations are opened until October 20th 2013, so still 45 days to help and support this amazing project.
There are many features and rewards presented in the project page, so do not hesitate to scroll down to the bottom to see it all.
By letting the Music free, Musopen is sharing to the world one of our most precious heritage. In times in which we are wondering how the music industry would evolve, this project tends to be leading the way and to be opening a new path in the music industry.
Info sourced on Musopen official information release, website, kickstarted.com. All content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available.
