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I don't think it's quite so drastic as you make it sound. In the original post he makes says the choice is between blowing the whole budget to hire a world-class symphony to record one piece, or contracting with a lesser-known organization (he suggests in Eastern Europe) to record a number of different symphonies. Either way we are talking about serious, dedicated musicians performing real music. I have attended concerts by some of the big names--LSO, LA Phil, San Francisco Symphony, Berliner Philharmoniker--as well as by many lesser-known ensembles. The difference in quality would be lost on 95% of the listening audience. As a classical musician it might be obvious to you, a little less so to me as a mere fan, but to most people it will just sound like professionally-recorded classical music. Certainly light-years ahead of what's out there today.

I don't disagree with anything you have said. My main point is that having very amateur work mixed with serious work means serious musicians will not trust it as a name. And that's fine -- it sounds like the founder understands this.

Abssolutely the largest challenge is this: accumulating a critical mass of content to bootstrap a change of mentality amongst leading musicians, who tend to be an extremely conservative community.

I tried to do something involving this as a startup four years ago, and content was far and away the hardest challenge. (The model involved giving away content, but selling torrent-seeds when no-one was offering content. Essentially the profit model was based around marking-up bandwidth, and using out-of-copyright music as the vehicle for it).

I spoke to lots of musicians during the course of that project, and live with musicians now. My pitch is that they should get themselves well known on the internet, and then charge large prices for their concerts and for teaching fees.

However, I've found all the musos I've spoken to over the last five years to be strongly addicted to (1) the model of producing and selling some sort of physical recording, and (2) the idea that they could one day make huge money from selling recordings, despite all the evidence pointing to what a limited future that model has. Even many amateur choristers puff themselves up with an idea that the content they produce is precious and valuable in a market (somewhere), and must therefore be protected from distribution on the internet where anyone could download it for free. (Oh the horror!!)

One contact (a well regarded instrumentalist) has only recently begun to upload content to youtube for promotional reasons. It has taken years for him to adjust to the idea that this might be a good idea. He was surprised to learn that he his name is becoming synonymous with a particular composer he performs, and adjusting to the idea that this might be a good thing, particularly when he's trying to get people along to his concerts.

Once the content is available and batched it won't be difficult to place a social media layer on top of it to give ordering, tag, recommendations, etc. The content is the key. I agree that quality is important, but once there's a critical mass, musicians will change their mindset and start to compete to get the best ratings on the internet.

We'll find that the top musicians on the websites will achieve a kind of celebrity and be in high demand for tours. This will be extremely good for "classical" music which has been decadent and moribund for decades.

But thats entirely the point, we arent trying to replace those recordings. Otherwise we really would be threatening commercial viability.

We want open recordings that people can use and not be sued for sharing, and this project is attempting to make them as decent as possible.

Bu they are seeking $11,000 to "hire an internationally renowned orchestra to record and release the rights to: the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies."

And they've already raised the money through Kickstarter.

Doesn't this invalidate your point or am I missing something?

I agree, I commented elsewhere that the first piece I listened to was very low-quality. But by raising enough money to hire the London Symphony Orchestra, they can conceivably move up to having lots of quality music.

One suggestion for museopen: like haberman says, a big problem is "wading through" the low quality recording. So when you start to record higher quality orchestras, make it very easy to tell between the "good quality" recordings and the cheap recordings.

I agree but its a balance, if you want to use Mendelssohn's Italian symphony for an animation, bad or not, you NEED something free. This happened to an animator entering a contest. Its not a perfect recording, but it did the job and is a great example of what we do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvUweYbXY9I&feature=playe...

* like the recording I found of Bach's First Cello Suite was performed on a piano! .*

I heard one of Godowsky's piano transcriptions and it sounded kind of corny, but it's a matter of taste. He's not definitely not considered an amateur. According to wikipedia Schumann also wrote one transcription. Or was it the original cello score played on the piano?

By the way, the cello suites sound great on the double bass too.

(sorry, couldn't edit it because of noprocrast)