Musopen

“Put simply, our mission is to set music free.”

Musopen (www.musopen.org) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. They provide recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. “Put simply, our mission is to set music free,” explained Aaron Dunn, founder of the organization.

Free, Open Music

Musopen ran into two major challenges that lead them to Project Galileo. The first challenge was serving a global audience of music learners with resources and infrastructure based in the US. Limited by the speed of light, transmitting information from the US to somewhere distant like Australia sees serious geographic latency and packet loss. This latency is even further compounded when the information being sent is in the form of large files, like the music resources Musopen offers.

Likewise, Musopen faced difficulties keeping their site online and secure. “We noticed several attempts to either spam, hack, or deny service to our users,” Dunn noted. “Both problems had us seek out solutions to keep our site online and available at all times, so we could meet our mission to set music free.”

Performance and Protection for the Arts

Musopen was accepted into Cloudflare’s Project Galileo and the improvement was dramatic. Musopen now serves content from the Projects global network of servers, reducing both the time it takes for content to load and the strain on their infrastructure. Dunn explained, “Project Galileo ensures that valuable resources, such as the collection of music resources we have worked hard to create, remain online and available to anyone around the world, without interference.” Not only has load time improved by over 25% for their global audience, but Project Galileo has protected Musopen’s site ensuring it remains fast and available at all times for any person curious to learn about music.