Upcoming changes

[Petia]

imslp wrote:
First, I just wanted to clarify that all users who made more than 100 edits automatically received a 10-year contributor membership


How to make 100 edits without too big an effort and do something useful: search "1 piano" in the imslp search field. Some results will contain "Instrumentation 1 piano" or "Instrumentation 1 Piano". Edit the work page and change this field into |Instrumentation=piano and save the page. You will easily find similar cases that want a change.

Note that imslp's sentence is at the past tense. Mr Guo never said that users that would make more than 100 edits now would receive a free subscription, and for a good reason.

I waited a few months to see if the public uproar would get the Petrucci LLC admins to back off. It did not. As many others, I have been unconvinced by the arguments posted here to support this turning a community effort into a revenue-generating machine. The financial opacity of the whole enterprise is not the least of my reservations, although I also frankly hated their lame argumentation around the difficulty of running the service on a not-for-profit basis.

It all started with the potential difficulty of keeping IMSLP sustainable on the long term. Now, ironically, IMSLP may be still alive today, but the IMSLP community spirit is dying.

I suggest giving the admins still another month to turn IMSLP into a trustable organization. By may, with no apparent progress, it'll be time to move on. What has been done here can be done elsewhere, on solid bases (not-for-profit organization, elected board, transparent financial reporting). I'm ready to help.

[imslp]

Note that imslp's sentence is at the past tense. Mr Guo never said that users that would make more than 100 edits now would receive a free subscription, and for a good reason.

Yes, good reason as in I don't want to give people an incentive to edit their user page a hundred times or do something else unproductive. If you get in a few good edits (don't even have to get to 100; 50 good edits will do), and e-mail membership@imslp.org, Carl or me would be most happy to give you membership.

[Gschladt]

Am I the only one thinking it is funny how past posts and ominous announcements referred to "a team of dedicated people" and "full board of administrators with tons of experience in non-profits" and "several top contributors were consulted"

suddenly became in the last post

"Carl or me"

?



I believe I owe an apology for suggesting IMSLP might be a for-profit company benefitting a single person. I asked to be proven wrong and I obviously was.

IMSLP is a for-profit venture benefitting two persons.

[wpalmer]

Am I the only one thinking it is funny how past posts and ominous announcements referred to "a team of dedicated people" and "full board of administrators with tons of experience in non-profits" and "several top contributors were consulted"

suddenly became in the last post

"Carl or me"

?



I believe I owe an apology for suggesting IMSLP might be a for-profit company benefitting a single person. I asked to be proven wrong and I obviously was.

IMSLP is a for-profit venture benefitting two persons.

I have served on the board of a number of non-profit organizations, and various family members have also. Some of the organizations were quite small, and others employed dozens of people and had budgets and assets comfortably into the 7 or 8 figure range. In no case was the entire board involved in operational activities. For that matter, it is unusual that board members have any day-to-day operational role, unless they are also employees. With for-profit boards, involvement in day-to-day operations is also rare; the charter of the board is to hire and oversee management to handle day-to-day operations, not do it themselves.

Your post suggests that you have slipped the bonds of rational discourse on this matter, and are now just lunging at any perceived opportunity to score points. This does not do any favors for those who would like to see more transparency and have the community input valued.

[Gschladt]

I'm terribly sorry, but I believe I'm being very rational when I question contradictory and disturbing statements coming from the very people that are trying to convince us they should be trusted.

All decisions are made by Project Petrucci's full board of managers, who have extensive experience in business, classical music, and computer science. Several have also served on the boards of non-profit arts organizations. All are actively involved in day to day operations, in addition to their other primary full-time jobs.

I know very well (I too have served on several boards in the past, and one at the moment) that in general, board members are not involved in day to day operations. Although there certainly are organisms where that is not true. But that's not the point I was making.

[tim.willis1685]

I waited a few months to see if the public uproar would get the Petrucci LLC admins to back off.

The admins had nothing to do with these changes.

[wpalmer]

I'm terribly sorry, but I believe I'm being very rational when I question contradictory and disturbing statements coming from the very people that are trying to convince us they should be trusted.

All decisions are made by Project Petrucci's full board of managers, who have extensive experience in business, classical music, and computer science. Several have also served on the boards of non-profit arts organizations. All are actively involved in day to day operations, in addition to their other primary full-time jobs.

I know very well (I too have served on several boards in the past, and one at the moment) that in general, board members are not involved in day to day operations. Although there certainly are organisms where that is not true. But that's not the point I was making.

Perfectly reasonable to state that they are involved in day to day operations and yet not have them involved in one particular operation, that of handling email to the membership address.

Clearly little point in trying to suggest anything which doesn't fit your beliefs, and I shouldn't have bothered.

[Petia]

The admins had nothing to do with these changes

Well Mr Edward Guo started this thread with "I will announce here that a subscription system for IMSLP will be put in place".
His signature being "imslp, Site Admin', I assumed that all site admins agreed with his decision. If it is wrong, pardon me.
Let's change that with "board members", if you prefer.

[VictorEijkhout]

The problem with virtually all print-on-demand services is the available page-sizes.

I mostly write music for quartet through octet. My music would probably cost 20 or so dollars from a regular publisher, and you would get a score plus each part separately. With lulu.com (which I use for other purposes) that would be nine books in case of an octet. Which comes to 50 or so dollars.

Print-on-demand is unsuitable for music for a variety of reasons.

Victor.

PS and right after i post this I find out about the Merton service. I'll let my comment stand for whatever its' worth.

[VictorEijkhout]

I don´t think at all, that Edward has the tendency to "pull the plug", but he can do it, if he wants to do so.

Just curious, what's the total amount of data in IMSLP and what's the traffic per day/week/whatever?

In case I (or anyone) would think of mirroring the whole caboodle.

Victor.

[Gschladt]

Well, they wouldn't tell you if your intention is to mirror it, would they?

Come to think of it, they probably wouldn't tell you anyway, since transparency is quite visibly not something that is valued at IMSLP.

[VictorEijkhout]

[...]

If you have nothing to say, please don't say it.

And someone already posted the number of daily downloads; what I'm interested in is volume.

V.

[throwaway192]

Just curious, what's the total amount of data in IMSLP and what's the traffic per day/week/whatever?

Here I read

Just in defence of the current host: his server is already taking the lion's share of IMSLP's bandwidth (it was ~250GB/day a year ago, must be ~400GB/day now),

This was 2010 but should give you an idea.

As I already stated in this thread, I would love to donate to any mirroring project.

[dmrowell]

To introduce myself first, I'm a small internet publisher, with websites, blogs, and other related online services. I primarily use a voluntary support 'PBS' style model myself, and so I have some experience both in understanding the costs of operating a service like IMSLP and in how to best recoup the costs.

The bandwidth and hosting costs IMSLP incur must be substantial. Downloads are really fast, and while it is easy to get free internet hosting offering 'unlimited' storage and downloading, there's usually an asterisk alongside the word 'unlimited' that says 'subject to our acceptable use policies' which ends up meaning that nothing is unlimited at all, and download speeds are often slow.

So I totally see the need for funding. I also see the many ways that the noble IMSLP project can be developed, extended, and enhanced.

Now for the concept of asking visitors to contribute and adding occasional 15 second delays prior to a download if they don't. I am absolutely astonished that anyone would object to this. Everything is still free, and the 15 second delay is trivial rather than profound. Most of the objections are from people who - if I may crudely paraphrase - are in essence saying 'I use IMSLP a lot, and if I had to wait 15 seconds, it would be very inconvenient, but even though I use it a lot, I think I should be entitled to everything for free'.

How can anyone make that statement and not feel embarrassed? If the direct primary beneficiaries of IMSLP are unwilling to support it, what right do they have to complain when trivial sized obstacles are erected in their path? As others have pointed out, the slightly strange $22 a year request is less than any of us would pay for purchasing a single piece of printed sheet music in a store.

And then there are the armchair experts, proclaiming that it should be easy to secure major financial support for the site. But, ummm, these same experts aren't actually rushing forward to secure that 'easy major support' that they claim is out there.

This is the mildest type of 'nagware' approach to encouraging people to support the site. I don't care if IMSLP has only one person running it or a cast of thousands. I don't care if the $22 is being greedily spent on booze, drugs, cigarettes and loose women, or on any other more noble purpose. I just see a really simple value equation - $22 buys you access to, I don't know, maybe $1 million worth of sheet music. And, there's no downside. If you don't want to pay, suck it in and wait 15 seconds.

The site owners/managers have my full support for this gentle approach. Thank you for not forcing me to have to pay, and allowing me to still continue to take content from you for free, any time I wish. And double thank you for not festooning the site with auto-play and impossible to stop video ads and other awful things.

[PedroJoséBernárdezS]

I'm surprised you didn't start it out like that. That you were able to keep it running so long is a credit to your ingenuity.

Considering the value you provide to users (and make no mistake, ISMLP is a service), I'm shocked that some would complain. You do not owe anything to "the music community", neither now or in the future. There is no such thing as "the music community"; it doesn't exist. There's only musicians, people who are willing or not willing to pay for a service which provides value to them. If they are willing, they are honest and honorable; they are not, and have the gall to complain., then they are nothing but looters who think you're their slave. And you're not.

You have the right to charge whatever you want for these services. It's YOUR website; YOU created it and YOU keep it going with the help of your volunteers whose efforts YOU direct and whatever streams of income YOU'VE created.

Again, YOU don't owe anyone anything. If IMSLP disappeared tomorrow, musicians would find their scores some other way. It might not be a faster or easier way, but they will do what they must- and they will pay whatever they must if they have to. That you created a place where they can do it- and for free no less- just shows how much VALUE you've created and how much people should be willing to compensate YOU for what you provide THEM.

Similarly, YOU don't have to listen to other people, especially LESS SUCCESSFUL people, and do what they ask or say to make competing with you easier.

I''m amazed that your subscription model is still so low. For the value you provide? You could charge at least three times that; access to the NAXOS library alone for one person is worth over $250. And YOU provide that AND hundreds of thousands of scores?

My point is you're nobody's slave; you exist because you have a right to, not to work as a slave for other people; you do what you do because it's what you want to do and you believe it is in your rational self-interest; and you have a right to trade your services for other people's money in whatever terms you both agree; if you cannot then they don't value it as much as their money.

Remember this.