Free Music Archive Update 2022 Sept

The Free Music Archive has made a lot of progress since our 2019 update. It is back to being a wonderful resource for artists to share and users to find free Creative Commons licensed works. Well done, FMA!

:: Looks much better, featuring a new LAYOUT with minimalist stylesheets.

:: All playable selections are dark until hover-over, which seems backwards.

:: Finally, the FMA is RESPONSIVE to your screen size! Looks great on all our devices.

:: MONETIZATION system in place for tipping artists!

:: The excellent AUDIO PLAYER is far superior to the original FMA player.

:: CHARTS seem to be active again. Not sure they are meaningful after years of not being tracked.

:: MIXES have returned, but are not playable for public from the mix pages, only for signed-in members.

:: FOLLOWERS (favorites) have been erased, so users need to re-follow (re-favorite) artists they like.

:: CURATORS and LABELS profiles have returned. LABELS has now been changed to NETLABELS, despite many not being netlabels, such as physical labels like Bloodshot Records

:: Cannot view profiles of USERS to see their favorites and mixes unless you are a signed in member

:: ARTIST SHUFFLE is a cool feature that loads the profile of a random artist

:: FEATURED MIXES and BLOG POSTS are only FMA staff at this time

:: White women shopping in record stores (for Elvis and Depeche Mode) are the default images for CURATORS, LABELS, and USERS regardless of sexual identity, race, or musical preference. Odd choice for defaults.

 :: No FORUMS or community feature, but COMMENTS seem to be active on recordings

Overall, the latest Free Music Archive looks great, functions very well, and is back on track for providing free Creative Commons licensed works to the public.  Go check it out!

FMA Update

Things are looking up for the Free Music Archive. In September, the FMA was purchased by Netherlands company Tribe of Noise, a privately owned business that handles music licensing for musicians and media producers. ToN are big supporters of the Creative Commons and seem to be a cool group.

The code of the original site was complicated, making it difficult for the last owners to do much with it, but drop ads on it and lock everyone out of the community. While the community is still not in play, Tribe of Noise has been undertaking the daunting task for the last two months of creating static HTML pages for all the recordings.

FMA was supplied with music by unpaid artists, built and maintained by predominantly volunteers. It is tricky to reconcile a formerly non-profit project with a for-profit company, but it costs a lot of money to host all that music. The original FMA paid Amazon to host the mp3s. That service alone cost $80,000 a year per 2016 fund drive information.

It is unclear what will eventually happen to the recordings holding stricter licenses (CC No Derivatives, FMA Limited License, etc.), but most of the music that was available when WFMU sold the FMA is now available again for free to the public. That is all thanks to the hard work of Tribe of Noise.

To keep up with their efforts to incorporate the FMA into ToN, you can follow the new FMA on Twitter and the development timeline at the bottom of the FMA official site.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes and getting back to work on what was a great project.