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Free Music Archive Is Shutting Down (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the another-good-thing-coming-to-an-end dept.

WFMU's Free Music Archive -- a digital library of high-quality and legal downloads that users could listen to, remix, and share -- is shutting down due to funding shortages. The Verge reports: "The future is uncertain, has been my mantra lately," says Cheyenne Hohman, who's been the director of the Free Music Archive since 2014. The shutdown date was initially the 9th, but has since been pushed back to November 16th because the FMA is in early talks with four different organizations that are interested in taking the project over. "The site may stay up a little bit longer to ensure, at the very least, that our collections are backed up on archive.org and the Wayback Machine." Even so, it's not a perfect solution. "If it just goes into archive.org, it's going to be there in perpetuity, but it's not going to be changing at all," Hohman says. "It's not going to be the same thing, that sort of community and project that it was for ... almost 10 years."

13 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Woah by Bobrick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Jesus christ, I'm gonna be downloading as much stuff as I can... this was my main music source for videos. This is a huge loss, the FMA is a godsend for a lot of indie production of all types.

    1. Re: Woah by Bobrick · · Score: 4, Informative

      Pirating? You realize this is essentially a Creative Commons database?

    2. Re:Woah by OneSizeFitsNoone · · Score: 2

      The site has been archived since 2008:

      https://web.archive.org/web/20...

      The domain was registered in 2007:

      Domain Name: FREEMUSICARCHIVE.ORG
      Registry Domain ID: D141981069-LROR
      Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.joker.com
      Registrar URL: http://www.joker.com/
      Updated Date: 2018-01-30T11:12:57Z
      Creation Date: 2007-03-21T19:52:05Z

  2. Bummer by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    That is a real bummer. Where will I get my minimalist dubstep alt-electronica music now?

  3. You cheap bastards by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You coulda parted with a couple of bucks to keep this excellent project going. I have a ton of friends who have put music on that site and I've contributed some too.

    You expect everything for free and this is why we can't have nice things.

    Here for example, check out these nice young men from the Northwest who play deep deep funk and have given music to the site for free.

    http://freemusicarchive.org/mu...

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
    1. Re:You cheap bastards by 110010001000 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Wow. Too bad there is no where else they can upload their music.

    2. Re:You cheap bastards by RickyShade · · Score: 3, Informative

      If only Jamendo existed.

    3. Re:You cheap bastards by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hard to donate when you haven't heard of the site before. In other discussions on here about the music industry people have suggested sites that they get their music from and I haven't seen this before.

    4. Re:You cheap bastards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, under CC BY-NC-ND, so you can't use it anywhere "commercially" nor can you remix it...so if you make a video with it and then monetize it, you've broken the license. Useless.

    5. Re:You cheap bastards by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is true. They could have promoted the site better. With luck, someone will buy it and do a better job. I remember it being a lot of chiptune and 8-bit music, but over time it's gotten to be a really nice little collection.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  4. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why do we keep seeing these type posts on /. for the first time, only after a site is soon to be shutdown or after it already has been shutdown?

    Seriously, I've never even heard of this site before now. I suspect many others haven't as well.

  5. Some alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's some alternatives:
    archive.org
    Bensound
    cctrax
    musopen
    bumpfoot
    incompetech
    audionautix
    audeeyah

  6. Re:How to guarantee originality? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Even if a musical composition and a recording thereof are under one of the Creative Commons licenses, that doesn't guarantee that the composition was in fact original.

    Just because a musical composition and a recording are commercially licensed doesn't guarantee it was original and not stolen from others either.

    Why bother to specify creative commons as if that makes any sort of difference here?

    All music for thousands of years is based on some one else, and a shockingly large amount of music in the last hundred or so years is flat out copied from someone else without permission, credit, or dues.