The AudioCommons project has come to an end

The Horizon 2020 EU-funded AudioCommons project has officially ended on 31st of January 2019. Between 2016 and 2019, the AudioCommons consortium has carried out a very large amount of work and succeeded in establishing the foundations of the Audio Commons Initiative, which supports a sustainable and growing ecosystem around Creative Commons (CC) audio content. AudioCommons has raised awareness of Creative Commons in the audio domain and has brought CC audio content closer to the Creative Industries, practitioners, and the general public. These goals have been reached not only due to the efforts of the original AudioCommons partners, but also thanks to the synergy resulting from the involvement of other collaborating institutions and individuals who engaged in music technology development and performance activities. Our dissemination report summarizes a range of endeavors that have generated impact both in the academic and tech sectors. The AudioCommons consortium has published more than 70 research papers, contributed to more than 30 academic and industry events, and developed around 20 tools, services and prototypes (including a commercial product already publicly released, and another commercial product which will be released in a near future). There are also a number of planned publications in preparation which will be submitted in the coming months. The vast majority of the AudioCommons research papers and the developed tools have open licenses that allow their reuse and further development by the community.

With the AudioCommons project being over, the continuity and growth of the Audio Commons Initiative remains subject to new funding and/or 3rd party initiatives that can take advantage of the work we’ve already done. The developments which took place during the project already contribute to a growing ecosystem for the distribution, retrieval and reuse of CC audio. Moreover, the project has identified further challenges faced by CC audio, e.g. in terms of metadata, audio quality metrics, licensing issues, and business models, suggesting new research directions and making recommendations for the future growth of such an ecosystem. The knowledge generated by the project has been shared openly through the project deliverables and paper publications. The full list of AudioCommons deliverables and publications can be found in the materials section of this website. Similarly, a list of tools, demonstrators and other resources can be found in the tools section.

The AudioCommons project has set the foundations for an open ecosystem of content, users and tools around Creative Commons audio, and proposed recommendations for future steps. It is our hope to see the initiative continue and inspire a new generation of content producers, technologists and researchers. It will be great to see where all this leads in the future.