If you feel like donating once the KickStarter project is complete, please use this link and you may donate directly on our website. All money will go towards the same project: http://www.musopen.com/donate.php

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Musopen is a non-profit dedicated to providing copyright free music content: music recordings, sheet music and a music textbook. 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? 1) Donate, and please spread the word. Then we will release that music in lossless quality with a creative commons CC0 license.

2) Vote for us on Reddit: http://bit.ly/dqKoPo

3) Vote for us on Digg: http://bit.ly/9YUI35

4) You can also help by voting for us on the PepsiRefresh website, tweet, and ask your friends to do the same! It could mean an extra 25k (which would guarantee a famous orchestra) http://pep.si/bAJ7XW

5) Use Twitter, facebook etc to spread the word.

6) Write to blogs! Anyone who might be interested, this is how we’ve gotten to where we are today, from the donors writing to others.

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.