Excellent questions. The main reason is that many of these performers are doing this for free. They love the idea, or they wouldn't have even responded to my emails. Others are doing this because they just want Musopen to cover the cost of a professional recording studio, so they have a top-notch portfolio. So most of the funds from this will be covering the concerti and recording studio costs, more than the "labor." Aaron

Bach PD organ works? Can you upload those to Musopen?

Thanks for this, great feedback. Will keep it in mind if we make this one. Aaron

If you're a person that wants to share or use the music in any way in addition to listening to them, yes definitely. It's also a way for people unfamiliar with music to browse and explore Chopin's music for free. Otherwise you're right.

API for Chopin actually. And it will be if we make it :) It'll be structured data: listing of all his music with composition dates links from each recording to his sheet music list of major events in his life wikipedia and liner notes about each piece geographical information related to the music or events in his life etc. So people can try to do various things, node map, timelines. We have some of our own ideas we'd like to try.

Whatever is on wikipedia will be included. We're also consulting with a professor of Music who has written extensively about Chopin.

Sadly copyrighted, we've asked the performer to release them. No luck so far.

I should add, /. was absolutely essential to the success of our first Kickstarter. I should release some info on our backers from the first time around, it's pretty interesting data. Suffice to say Slashdot referrals made up 30% of the total. So I guess I'm saying I'm counting on you :)

Thanks for all the comments and for those that have backed us. I'll be here if anyone has any questions/comments they'd like answered. -Aaron

Just about any other composer would be very challenging, a mixture of many more ensemble types, many more hours of music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, would be easier but still very hard.

Actually we did, now you know what was in the safe: http://www.dailydot.com/society/reddit-whatsinthisthing-locked-safe-new-zealand/

We're also going to offer standard CD formats, so no need to worry. If we raise enough money that is.

FYI Moonlight wasn't included in this project, and secondly, many live performances have coughing, thought our recordings for this Kickstarter were very clean.

Thanks for the comment. Please feel free to shoot me an email at aaron [at] musopen.org and I'll see what we can do to improve it. Keep in mind most of the things that are lacking like that are due to volunteer constraints, if we could get more time we could add quite a bit.

Some of the music you mention wasn't part of this project and was recorded by a college orchestra. I did want to re-record it, next time maybe.