Freesound Forums
keeping the site alive
Started April 6th, 2006 · 34 replies · Latest reply by Walter_Odington 16 years, 12 months ago
Have you considered bundling all the sounds onto a dvd, which you could sell. Profit from the cd used only to support the site. I don't think that anyone would argue with you using their files for that purpose. It's a lenghty process finding and downloading whereas a catagorised dvd would be a boon. I use 2Co.com for visa services and cart, one off minimal payment at startup and then they just take a percentage of sale after that. I run a similar scheme at www.computermusictutorials.com if you want to check it out. I don't make a fortune it just pays for my expenses in poviding that service.
The whole idea of this site is that that can be used freely under the creative commons license.
perhaps not a bad idea except:
* university policy does not alow us to do this.
* selling sample-dvd's puts us in immediate danger of lawsuits if not everyone follows the rules.
* the whole freesound database is 25GB, this is 5 DVD's. not an easy task.
* the whole point of freesound is delivering a nice interface for browing samples. this would have to be translated to the DVD's. How do you search in a database of 16000 files on DVD?
Thanks for the idea though!
- bram
Sonic
The whole idea of this site is that that can be used freely under the creative commons license.
Selling media with free content on it is not only not unusual, it's common practice. Look at all the Linux distributions that you can download for free, or buy the CD. The Open CD project offers the same. I've bought Slackware on CD before because I didn't want the hassle/time consumption of downloading. I also offer for sale a CD of all the photos that I've contributed to the morgueFile.com archive where people can download them (and use them) for free.
I understand the other concerns that Bram mentioned, I just wanted to point out that having a site offer free (liberated) content for free (no cost) is not inconsistent with selling media containing the same content. Those who want it for only the cost of their time can do so, while those who want to pay for the convenience would have that option.
(Wow, 25GB, that's a lot of sound!)
Well, there's a few things about keeping Freesound alive.
First of all there's the aspect of bandwidth and hardware. As far as I can see, university has no problem with the bandwidth, and the current hardware should be able to keep us up and running for at least another year or two/three, depending on the future growth of freesound (the number of people signing up every day increases lineary with time right now). The bandwidth might get us into trouble in the end, but that could be solved relatively easy by using mirrors for the wave files.
Then there is the aspect of moderation and administration of the site and expansion of the current set of features.
This one is more difficult. Right now I'm the only programmer working on Freesound, this is probably not a good idea, nor is it healthy for future expansion. My contract with MTG finishes on June 31'st, however, there is some money for freesound. The "Price of the city of Barcelona" got us about 7500€ (minus taxes) which can be used to keep Freesound alive. This money will perhaps be used to pay me (or another programmer) half or quarter time, to work on Freesound's software. This could be me but someone else as well.
Other than that there is a bit of interest from the Catalan government, so we might possibly get a grant from them.
Administration issues are not that difficult right now as the new server is much more stable. Someone with a bit of linux, php and mysql knowledge can administrate our server.
There are 3 moderators right now (me, anton and plagazul) and anton and plagazul are doing a splendid job although they can't always be there. Moderation is difficult and requires a certain particular kind of person. You need to know a lot about music (identify the problematic/illegal samples), a lot of patience and friendlyness (mailing people about legality issues) and be very dedicated to the task while moderating. But, finding more moderators should not be that difficult.
Right now the future of myself+freesound is a bit unclear, but Xavier Serra (the director of the MTG) has promised that he will keep Freesound alive as long as he can. The addition of features might be stopped, but at least the site will stay "as is" for a long enough time.
A disaster scenario can be though of, but we can solve this by taking all the content from Freesound (and the database) and finding another host. Right now the content is to be considered free, and so is the database.
Let me know what you guys think.
- bram
Hi Bram and others,
As I see it, there are several ways to deal with Freesound's future without needing to exploit it commercially.
You may apply for a grant with the Catalan government. The prize money can also be used, but that is just a temporal solution, and the amount is not that much.
As an alternative you may want to see whether you could turn to the European Commission. They hand out grants and subsidies regularly. The positive side is that EC grants are usually large (think 50K - 100K euro) and that should keep the website running for a considerable amount of time. . The downside is the amount of red tape: lots of application forms, review forms, evaluation forms etc. It can drive you crazy (I can tell you...). Plus, you will need to make clear why this project is of importance for the EU but that shouldn't be a real obstacle. More info at http://europa.eu.int/comm/avpolicy/media/index_en.html
Thirdly, you can consider to demand a membership fee but this has been discussed before and I know that this is not a very good solution. However, if that is the only way to keep Freesound alive, then it needs to be considered.
- LG
Perhaps an organisation like archive.org would be interested in hosting as most of their media is Creative Commons material.
When I mentioned selling a dvd what I mean is that a lot of people still do not have access to broadband and would rather have this kind of material on physical media.
I agree with the membership idea. If you kept it to a small one off charge (say $5) then who could argue with that. $5 for unlimited access to a mountain of samples is nothing.
Are you allowed to gain revenue from advertising on the site?
Do you think letters from around the world thanking the Catalans for helping to support the project would help? Pointing out the fantastic pride the Catalans must feel, the kudos they gain, the many Americans/Japanese/etc who may have never heard of Catalonia until their involvement in Freesound and some of whom are bound to now visit as tourists, etc. I'm sure that from among 66,000 registered users we could rustle up a few hundred.
But who would be the best people to write to? Bram, do you have any ideas of who might be making funding decisions or who would be appreciative of such praise?
Or isnt there some megawealthy pop star out there getting ideas for their new album by cruising Freesound who would be willing to donate 1% of their royalties as a sort of voluntary creativity tax?
ukslice
Perhaps an organisation like archive.org would be interested in hosting as most of their media is Creative Commons material.
That's an excellent idea if ever freesound finds itself in a situation where it can no longer keep the database online. We could also merge our sample libraries into another project like ccMixter... although I personally hope that freesound is able to remain freesound. There are a lot of cool features here that make it really easy to find what you're looking for.
As mentioned before, ads (perhaps unobtrusive google text ads) might help defray operating costs in the future, if they are allowed.
Here is another free resource.
How much server space are you guys using? Are you in the terabyte range yet?
:?:
I see where you are also thinking about google ads?
I think we should worry about it when we are close to having a problem. selling the cd's doesn't make sense. but hey perhaps you could do it for people who want this? sell the cd for 20 or so (i mean really sample cd's freaking start at 50 bucks and up..and half of them are either super junk cd's or only have about 1000 samples and most of those are freaking loops not one shots..really loops are useless to me...anyway) if the uni doesn't have problems with the bandwith right now...hell keep mooching off of it.
but something tells me..and this ain't a knock..when the money runs out so will the project.
so is it really a labor of love? or just a job? seems to me like the only ones who have anything to lose are the contributors.
but that's my opinion. because in all reality here on the internet there's space for this stuff-and if we can't find a place to house it all..then its nobody's fault but our own.
hock: FREESOUND IS A LABOR OF LOVE! 
Love from the contributors, the downloaders, anyone and everyone who supports or uses freesound! I can't fathom the idea of freesound dying!
Creative Commons is becoming more and more popular lately, with new indie film/music producers popping up all the time, they need sounds to work with, and they hear about creative commons and they get interested and they'll come to freesound, they'll go to ccmixter, they'll go to wherever.
Producers need samples. They want to be able to get the samples easily. That's what freesound's for. And sure one could go google searching for sounds, but there is no other FREE catalog of samples that has ANYWHERE NEAR as many samples as freesound.
there's no need to say "viva freesound", because freesound has already established it's immortality. users, moderators, and contributers alike, I'm sure, will all do as much as possible to keep freesound going.
Bram* university policy does not alow us to do this.
but it allows you to sell Tshirts and receive donations.
what do you think about this:
- if you upload then you can download (even not 1 to 1, i.e. you upload 1 then download 5 or 10)
- if you buy a Tshirt or make a donation then you'll have a number of samples to download
- if you upload no samples (and make no donation nor buy a Tshirt) then you can't download - maybe only a few samples.
the goal is to improve users' activity and donations - it should sounds not like "to pay for samples" but "to contribute to the community". many users never upload a sample, only download: I have no points against such users, "Free" is a main concept to me - but "energy balance" too, you give then you take, "sharing" is a two way activity. users which upload could go on without thinking about money. and sometime the community could offer interesting packs to everybody.
I understand that upload-download management is a complex task which asks for resources in time and people - hard to do but not impossible, revenues could pay back the efforts.
I anyway like the idea of more banners of sites technically and thematically related to FreeSound
