That being said, I am a "member" of other charitable organizations that have employees and expenses, like World Wildlife, the Nature Conservancy, or PBS. Paying to be a member doesn't really detract from their noble mission in any way.
The difference, of course, is that IMSLP does not have the same charity status that those organizations have.
imslp wrote: With respect to the non-profit vs. for-profit debate, we did indeed investigate the non-profit route. As Choralia knows, I asked for CPDL's 501(c)(3) paperwork as reference a few months ago. But as I mentioned in one of my e-mail discussions recently, I keep on getting stuck on the question of where funding comes from. Publishers are certainly not going to provide us charitable funding. Many of the great European music libraries exist in large part because of governmental funding for the arts - a level of funding not matched in the United States or Canada to any extent.
If you're not a traditional music library, why do you only focus on the traditional sources of funding for such libraries? Was any attempt made to exploring crowdsourcing? Was any thought given to taking advantage of the massive international user-base of IMSLP - something that no library bound to a physical location can claim - to create a donation drive in order to secure the funding needed? If the answer to either question is no, then I must seriously question the thought and research that has gone into this.
Before this, I reckon IMSLP might have had enough credibility to write to music departments, conservatories and musical associations across the nation and the globe if it wanted to engage on a one-time fund-raising campaign to form a foundation. The schools themselves didn't even have to donate; they could simply have been asked to forward the message to their faculty and students and let each individual decide whether to donate. Now, after IMSLP has taken a torch to its own credibility? Who knows.
Again, things like this have to happen
after making a commitment to be non-profit, not before.
imslp wrote: And, where are the grants? No foundation I know of will give a significantly large grant for maintaining an online score library that has already stuck around for 10 years (and has stirred some legal controversy in the past to boot). Plus, significant grant dollars are not usually given without an agenda or request on the part of the giver, and I do not wish IMSLP to be subject to the whims of a single foundation (or even several foundations) who does not necessarily have IMSLP's best interests at heart (not blaming them - they have their priorities).
Do these statements reflect the actual results of grant proposals written, or are they conjectures? As far as agendas or requests on the part of the giver, I don't see how they can be a problem, as long as they are of a nature that enables certain things without restricting others. If someone offers a $500 grant stipulating that it be used in maintaining the music of Jewish composers, for example, is it not better to have the grant and redistribute your other resources elsewhere, than to not have the grant at all?
If one is concerned about autonomy, the right thing to do is to be mindful of a grant's terms and be judicious about accepting them. It's the same as donations, and I say it's severely hampering oneself to shut out the possibility of donors expressing a preference on how their donations are used. It's absolutely ok, as long as they don't have any say in other people's donations.
imslp wrote: Not to mention, who is going to spend the time writing all the grants, doing the research and making the contacts?
What the heck, if IMSLP had a management structure I could believe in, I would do it.
Of course in reality I doubt you would trust a complete stranger to do it, but how hard have you tried to mine your population of contributors for people who might have the relevant knowledge?
imslp wrote: With respect to an annoucement and discussion with the general public prior to the rollout, I wanted to avoid panic and rumours before people got a chance to actually see what it is and realize that it is optional and not a "paywall" or the typical membership scheme.
This logic is absolutely absurd.
It also represents a thorough rejection of IMSLP as a community effort. What you say essentially translates to this: I know better and I'm making the decision because it's good for you. It's very patriarchical, a very 'L'etat c'est moi' kind of thinking, and it's of course your right to do so as sole private owner, but in that case I just find it incredibly disingenuous that IMSLP continues to claim that it is a community project.
"Honey, I'm moving the family to Iceland. I didn't tell you because I was afraid that you would freak out if I talked to you about it."
This could have come straight out of a comedy show, except even funnier because people are getting a chance to actually see it and they
do see it as your typical membership scheme, a paywall. Even people who support the plan on principle. The plan really could not have failed more miserably, could it.
imslp wrote: I did solicit feedback early December in the administrator forum (when the membership project was just starting), and had gotten generally positive feedback which eased my concerns
KGill wrote:For the record, Feldmahler announced this in the Moderation Forum on December the 13th. It was presented as a done deal at that time, essentially.
Some discussion it seems to have been.
imslp wrote: And, sometime in the midst of all of this, I decided to try being more aggressive in asking for donations. As some of you may (or may not) have noticed, in addition to the "Donate" button in the sidebar, you will get a prompt to donate once for every 50 downloads you make. Very little happened. I don't think most people even notice the popup and go straight for the "X" in the upper right corner.
So basically, you're saying that you haven't tried. This is like girl scout's putting up a stall in their own bedrooms and expecting to sell cookies that way. By your own admission you didn't try any Wikipedia-style banners, any front-page fund-raising campaigns redirects once per browser session, but only something that was guaranteed to be ineffective. And if you have reservations about collecting donations this way because of the lack of non-profit status, that is an entirely self-inflicted issue.
I presume that downloads are tracked through logged-in accounts, because I don't know how you can track guest downloads. I would guess that at least 99% of all IMSLP users visit as guests without ever creating an account. If that is indeed the case, then
no wonder nothing came out of a method that ignores virtually the entire IMSLP user base.
In that light,
Sallen112 wrote:If everyone here thought that the site can be sustainable forever with purely donations, especially with a site like this that host pages of text and files, this sort of thing won't last and isn't sustainable.
simply rings hollow. How can you know that a donation model is not sustainable
without ever seriously trying?
Sallen112 wrote:If you think trying comparing Wikipedia to IMSLP, it doesn't exactly compare because WIkipedia doesn't host PDF files like IMSLP does, they have millions of pages of text but IMSLP goes a step further and host not just hundreds of thousands of pages of text, but also hundreds of thousands of large files, which consumes more bandwidth and data.
So does Wikimedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alex ... ped%29.jpg
A high-resolution image file is often larger than a scan of an entire sonata.
Sallen112 wrote:The reason Wikipedia exists still is because of there massive Userbase, which is hundreds of thousands of times larger than IMSLP, they can rely on donations as there main source of funding because they have the Userbase for it, IMSLP is much smaller.
I'm getting tired of hearing people bring up this as a defense without addressing how CPDL continues to operate.
homerdundas wrote:This is not an empty suggestion: as part owner of the Canadian and EU servers and I can say that this simple appeal has been successful in generating enough donor funding to operate not only the two servers, but this forum web site. Note that in a subscription process we could even have the user agree in advance to the terms of the disclaimer, thus eliminating any additional page displays for times the user chooses to log in.
Sallen112 wrote:We could find months where the donations start declining and then the site could be faced with a total shutdown, which nobody wants.
When that happens,
then you introduce a subscription. It's perfectly acceptable to establish a plan for implementing subscriptions for a rainy day, but not when alternative means have not been exhausted. Not as a panic reaction to something that may or may not happen sometime in the unknown future, which this is.
Is IMSLP's operations so tight that it cannot maintain a reserve? It doesn't look like it. Maintain a reserve as buffer, keep plans for subscription membership in the back pocket, and start seriously considering it if the reserve is being drained.
Again I emphasis that I'm not saying you
cannot implement a subscription model, but it's something that should be done only when other reasonable and obvious means have actually been tried and deemed ineffective. Edward Guo's own statement indicate that it is not the case. He claims that he has exhausted his imagination, and this statement has been put under serious challenge.
Implementing an earnest donation-based model does NOT preclude the possibility of introducing subscription in the future. Introducing subscription now, without evidence of having sufficiently explored other venues, DOES significantly and negatively impact IMSLP's ability to obtain donations in the future, and I hold that it does more harm than good in ensuring IMSLP's long-term sustainability. I question the lack of judgment and thought going into this process demonstrated by IMSLP's management and its attempts at justifying them have simply made things even more questionable.
Believe it or not, there are in fact other people championing worthy causes too. To adopt a daddy-knows-best attitude that everybody else is just too spoiled or stupid to recognize that you are the messiah of the music world and your word is God's word, to feel smugly that you have monopoly over your field and that people have no choice but to take whatever comes, to say that "sure you can try, but nobody will go to your site because they're all coming here", is the very definition of entitlement and does absolutely nothing to help IMSLP's cause.
=========================================
Lastly.
If IMSLP does consider itself a community effort - and the "if" is getting bigger by the minute - then
perception IS reality. Support from the community is as important as money; in fact, it
is where the money comes from. At this point, it doesn't matter if we are in fact all imbeciles who are just too stupid to understand that Christ is the saviour. The community backlash is real, and there will be consequences if they are not addressed; there will be consequences if IMSLP chooses to go down this path single-mindedly.
I could be wrong and in five years people might get used to it. Eels get used to skinning, after all. IMSLP might continue to exist as the top dog in the free music scores realm, and newcomers will only know the world where they either pay for membership or waiting their 15 seconds, not knowing the original mission under which these scores were submitted. Enough scores have been uploaded to IMSLP that it could probably remain commercially viable even if from this point on no new scores are ever added, if it chooses this form of existence.
Or not. One should not feel
entitled to the community's goodwill for ever and ever when one has strayed from the original mission.
If IMSLP chooses to take the chance, so be it. Just don't say that you weren't warned.
Lincoln Hui