Musopen is a non-profit library of copyright free music. This project will use your donations to purchase and release music to the public domain. Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn’t be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted. There is a lifetime of music out there, legally in the public domain, but it has yet to be recorded and released to the public.

This isn’t just a crazy idea: we’ve done this before using donations from our website, but now we want to tackle something much more ambitious.

We want your help to hire an internationally renowned orchestra to record and release the rights to: the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies. We have price quotes from several orchestras and are ready to hire one, pending the funds.

What can I do?
Donate, and vote on what we should buy with the money. Then we will release that music in lossless quality with a creative commons license.

You can also help by voting for us on these sites:
Vote for us on Digg (hopefully Digg V4 is working): http://bit.ly/9YUI35
Vote for us on Reddit: http://bit.ly/birkg8
Vote for us on BoingBoing: http://bit.ly/dBLdUN

Or Using Twitter, facebook etc to spread the word.

What about beyond 10k?
Every $1000 buys a complete set of Mozart violin sonatas, or all of Chopin’s mazurkas, ballades, or nocturnes… a little money buys a LOT of music.

Where does the music go afterwards?
Thanks to generous and free hosting from ibiblio, music will remain on our website indefinitely, and we will share it with other organizations: included in Wikipedia articles, added to archive.org, and integrated with OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) laptops.

Project location: Palo Alto, CA