Thank you to everyone who supported our first ccMixter fundraiser. We raised $15,888 for ccMixter thanks to your participation. While we fell short of our goal, we learned a lot and have made some great strides forward for our community.

What did we accomplish?

1. Covered our server costs.
The $15,888 we raised will cover our server costs for 12 months! This will cover the cost of the back-up servers too, and a couple of other minor recurring monthly expenses. This takes a lot of pressure off us and we are very grateful.

2. Strengthened our community.
We celebrated our 10 year anniversary with new members and long-timers alike! We had the biggest Secret Mixter to date (67, vs. the previous biggest of 46). Many of us posted some of our all-time favorite tracks here at ccMixter and rediscovered some of our past creations. We shared pictures of our music gear and learned more about each other in the process. We remixed each other as a sign of our desire to support ccMixter, and many people in our community financially supported ccMixter too (several anonymously). This is a demonstration of the value we have for the way we create music together and the uniquely special place we share here at ccMixter.

3. Growth beyond our community.
Facilitated by Sackjo22 and Gurdonark, ccMixter was featured on several podcasts sponsored by the open-source community, including Ryno the Bearded, Music Manumit, FLOSS weekly, TheAudioPodcast, and The Linux Action Show. We launched official YouTube & Vimeo Channels (thanks to Kara Square and Loveshadow). We started a ccMixter Pinterest Page (thanks to Jeris). We started a ccMixter Instagram account. Our Twitter following tripled. Through our Trackback Drive, we received financial support from folks that use our music in their YouTube vids. ccMixter sign-ups and uploads remain steady and were higher than the same time last year.

4. New Levels of Volunteering.
As people within and without our community learn more about ccMixter, the good things we do in the world of Creative Commons music and our needs, more people are starting to volunteer behind the scenes. Victor has been able to help a great deal again and we’re so happy to have him back! Richard and Alex are working together on code updates, with more feedback and help from others. chaosdan, Tom of Music Manumit and airtone have already started helping us with updates on aspects of our web-design and UI. Clarence Simpson is helping us improve our Trackback process at YouTube. Many of you continue to help us monitor site spam (Speck, shorthopper). Several of you have helped advise behind the scenes on how to explore sponsors and other opportunities (keytronic, Copperhead, Panu, musikpirat). We’ve developed a list of things you can volunteer to help ccMixter with here — please email us if you can join in. We are stronger as a whole thanks to each of you.

5. ccPlus
During the fundraiser, many of you opted into ccPlus - and there was a significant increase in ccPlus license sales during the two months of our fundraiser (75% goes to the artists, 25% to support ccMixter). As more of you sign-up (we hope you will), and as we continue to build our ccPlus library by tagging tracks ccPlus (right now it is a manual process), we believe this will grow and be a positive avenue to show you value, help folks understand the difference between non-commercial and commercial CC licenses, and support ccMixter.

6. The Future
We’re exploring sponsorships of remix events, non-instrusive ads only on dig.ccMixter.org, new curations, placement of our ccPlus library, and other opportunities to support ccMixter’s growth. We’re finding that if we ask for support from users outside our community we receive a positive reaction — donations of time, talent and funds. Many of us are contacted by folks that want to use our music in their projects, and we’re finding that encouraging them to support ccMixter in that process yields positive results so we encourage you to try it. We will continue to encourage and accept donations to ccMixter at anytime, from those who can contribute.

Personally, I’ve learned that I need to be more communicative with all of you. I also appreciate it when you reach out to me as well. Thank you.

In summary, we feel our fundraiser was indeed a success. And while ccMixter still has a long to-do/wish list of improvements, new features and more, we are together taking steps to move forward.

Thank you all for giving your creativity, music, time, and spirit to ccMixter.

Peace.

Thank you for sharing this beautiful summary. It makes me feel hopeful for ccMixter’s future and proud to be part of this community.

This was really a big project and it was really great fun to be part of it.
I am very glad to hear that the server and backup costs are covered with the fund raised.

And much more I am happy that the world became smaller by having music as a connector - and this project led to many new connections made.

Thank you for all your blood you have putten into this.