Musopen is a charity that aims to produce and distribute recordings and sheet music of public domain music.

Musopen is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. We want to give the world access to music without the legal hassles so common today. There is a great deal of music that has expired copyrights, but almost no recordings of this music is in the public domain. We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.

They’ve currently got material from 29 composers – from Bach to Brahms, Mozart to Mussorgsky. An interesting feature of the project is it allows users to suggest pieces that they would like to have recorded – and to pledge funds to have the recording made. The bid page lists 14 bids with over $1100 pledged.

The recordings produced are dedicated to the public domain and hence can be freely re-used and re-distributed for any purpose – from being shipped with educational projects to being remixed or sampled in new tracks. They use an open knowledge button in their footer to show that the material is compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition. Rufus Pollock, director of the OKF, is an advisor to the project.

If you know any musicians who might be interested in donating recordings, or if you’d like to participate in the project – head over to the contribute page to see how you can get involved!

Related posts:

1. Public Domain Works Database Project The Open Knowledge Foundation have been working on a Public Domain Works Database in association with with Free Culture UK (as part of FC-UK’s larger Public Domain Burn project). There is now a front-end site up (as of last weekend!)...
2. Public Domain Calculators: updates and a new list! Back in June we solicited for assistance in a project to build a series of calculators to ‘map’ the public domain in different jurisdictions, by showing which works are out of copyright. There are now individuals and groups keen to...
3. Mapping the Public Domain – Call for Assistance! For a while we’ve been planning to help to produce a set of Public Domain Calculators – which each aim to indicate whether or not a given work is in the public domain in a given jurisdiction. The idea arose...