Barcelona-based audio archive Freesound is working on new ways to help small content producers monetize their Creative Commons content, in a move that could have significant impacts on all types of content producers.
Freesound is the sound exchange platform of the Music Technology Research Group (MTG) of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) of the University Pompeu Fabra. The non-profit has now obtained a grant from the Grant for the Web initiative to promote new monetization tools, and encourage research on how web monetization can benefit specific communities. This award “is very significant as it recognizes the promotion of open access digital culture,” explain the promoters of the MTG project.
“With this grant we will start the new project Freesound Licensing, a platform to help content creators monetize their sounds by re-licensing them to content users that need usage rights beyond those allowed by the sounds’ original CC restrictions,” said Freesound in a statement.
Freesound is currently the largest website in the world for sharing audio clips on Creative Commons. It contains nearly 500,000 sounds of all kinds, from field recordings to samples of musical instruments, foley, speech and musical loops. The goal of Freesound is to promote an exchange space for reuse. Since its inception, site users have downloaded more than 150 million sounds.
Grant for the Web is a $100 million fund to boost open, fair and inclusive standards and innovation in web monetization. Grant for the Web is led by the company Coil in collaboration with Mozilla and Creative Commons.