Public Domain Works

Some Statistics

March 25th, 2007

We’ve been busy hacking away and as a result we now have some rough statistics:

1. Composers whose works are out of copyright. Of the 1083 composers listed in the data kindly donated to us by Philip Harper we estimate that, as of January 1st 2007:

   • Out of Copyright: 263
   • In Copyright: 762
   • Status Unknown: 58

2. Musicbrainz coverage. Basic querying of musicbrainz indicates that they have the following number of releases per year:

   • 106 releases between 1957 -1958,
   • 103 releases between 56-57
   • 59 releases between 55-56
   • 32 release between 54-55
   • 23 for 53-54
   • 15 for 52-53
   • 14 for 51-52
   • 9 for 50-51
   • 7 for 49-50
   • 35 for 1939 to 1949
   • 36 for 1919 to 1939
   • 7 for 1800 to 1919

Combining these together just shows what a need there is to have a project like this: there are lots of composers whose works are out of copyright but very few of the out-of-copyright recordings of their works are available.

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