We’ve been busy hacking away and as a result we now have some rough statistics:
- 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
- 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.
Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge.
