Musopen was created by music producer Aaron Dunn (born 1983), then a
bassoonist attending
Skidmore College of
Saratoga Springs, New York. The site attracted more attention in 2008, when it commissioned recordings of
Ludwig van Beethoven's
32 piano sonatas for public domain release. By May 2008, the site included 100 pieces and a now-obsolete "
bidding system", where users could pay money towards the recording of specific works. In 2010, Musopen received considerably more attention; the music critic Jim Farber remarked that it became an "overwhelming hit (literally and figuratively)". amid its organization of a major fundraiser via
Kickstarter to commission recordings of a larger repertoire. The fundraiser looked to record the symphonies by Beethoven,
Brahms,
Tchaikovsky and
Sibelius, alongside a plethora of chamber music for public domain dissemination. The project raised a total of , more than six times their initial target of . The
Czech Philharmonic was commissioned to record the works; after which the audio files were uploaded both to its website and
Archive.org. The final list of music was announced in August 2012, and included Beethoven's
3rd Symphony, the piano sonatas of
Franz Schubert, Brahms's four symphonies, string quartets by
Mozart, and a variety of other orchestral and chamber works. In September 2013, a second Kickstarter fundraiser was launched by Musopen to record the
complete works of
Frédéric Chopin. Musopen stands with
ChoralWiki and the
Wind Repertory Project as among the most prominent online music repertoire databases. It has been compared favorably to both Wikipedia It has also been likened to the
Open Goldberg Variations, a crowdfunded project by Robert Douglass and pianist
Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka, to create a copyright-free recording of
J.S. Bach's complete
Goldberg Variations. In 2022,
Business Insider ranked it among the "5 best websites for downloading public domain music", alongside FreePD,
Free Music Archive, Open Music Archive and Mubert Render. == References ==