Tribe Of Noise Acquires Free Music Archive
Musician community and services company Tribe of Noise has acquired the Free Music Archive (FMA), an open music platform curated by artists. The FMA site went into maintenance-mode over the weekend as part of the move transferring the repertoire, data and code.
Both services offer curated music to media makers with a focus on music composed and recorded by independent artists and using the Creative Commons open licensing model
Details of the deal were not disclosed. 
“I am excited. It feels like our launch in 2008 all over again”, says Founder & CEO at Tribe of Noise, Hessel van Oorschot. “More than 10 years ago we launched our online community and invited the first musicians to join. This week we are inviting a massive global audience of music enthusiasts to join the journey of our musician-centric community. We cannot wait to see the fruits of these two creative communities coming together.”
Video gear rental marketplace and creator community Kitsplit, the former owner of FMA, praises the acquisition: “We could not have found a better candidate to manage FMA’s community of musicians, videographers, YouTubers, podcasters, and other music enthusiasts. FMA is the number one resource for free music to many creatives around the world and it deserves the attention and expertise Tribe of Noise can offer”, says Lisbeth Kaufman, CEO at Kitsplit.
“Tribe of Noise is a global, musician-centric online community where we facilitate, collaborate and pay the participating artists for sharing new, inspiring sounds with us and our customers every single day. These talented artists need our support more than ever. Their repertoire in a fair, sustainable business model will shape a healthy future for independent musicians around the world. That’s our number one priority”, writes Sandra Brandenburg, Founder and Chair at Tribe of Noise.
Tribe of Noise will start sub-licensing other people’s work which was formerly freely available without condition and start demanding that people pay for it, thus breaking the whole point of having a free music archive.
They already did. For one single song you have to pay between $45 – $900+ depending on the license type. We all know FMA was too good to last in an era where creativity is inhibited by money.
Take something beautiful made by a community and fuck everything up just because your shiny ass wants to add some more gold to the pile. This is the policy of ToS in a nutshell. “[…]will shape a healthy future for independent musicians around the world”… more like healthy future for their own fuckin wallets.
It is extremely sad that all the people that were using the music on FMA non-commercially have to suffer because of the greed of a bootleg money-hungry company. But that’s how the nowadays world works. This is, literally why we can not have nice things. What’s next? A $200 subscription a month to read stuff on reddit?