We’ve been busy hacking away and as a result we now have some rough statistics:

  1. Composers whose works are out of copyright. Of the 1083 composers listed in the data kindly donated to us by Philip Harper we estimate that, as of January 1st 2007:
    • Out of Copyright: 263
    • In Copyright: 762
    • Status Unknown: 58
  2. Musicbrainz coverage. Basic querying of musicbrainz indicates that they have the following number of releases per year:
    • 106 releases between 1957 -1958,
    • 103 releases between 56-57
    • 59 releases between 55-56
    • 32 release between 54-55
    • 23 for 53-54
    • 15 for 52-53
    • 14 for 51-52
    • 9 for 50-51
    • 7 for 49-50
    • 35 for 1939 to 1949
    • 36 for 1919 to 1939
    • 7 for 1800 to 1919

Combining these together just shows what a need there is to have a project like this: there are lots of composers whose works are out of copyright but very few of the out-of-copyright recordings of their works are available.

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Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge.