OpenScore: Liberating sheet music:
Launched just a few weeks ago, OpenScore is a new crowdsourcing initiative to digitize sheet music by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven, and make them freely available for everyone to use for any purpose. We have come a long way since we announced the project back in February, and I would like to share the developments with you now.
This is an incredibly ambitious initiative and will have a tremendously positive impact on the music community. I admire their method of creating incentive for users to contribute to the catalogue:
The lesson we took from other projects is that if you sit around and wait for people to transcribe the pieces they like, you’ll end up with ten transcriptions of the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and none of the other movements. We will overcome this by placing a bounty on works that have not yet been transcribed. The bounty comes in the form of free membership of MuseScore’s score sharing website.
I might consider transcribing something. I am also going to be contributing to their Kickstarter, which you can view by clicking here.