>> Daniel, can you explain more about the motivation for your question?
>
> I'm just trying to figure out what would motivate me to pay to put content
> on Ambisonia.

To access audience. Ambisonia will provide both an audience and an
infrastructure to make it very easy to consume ambisonic work,
quickly.

> As an occasional content producer on Ambisonia and free Ambisonic software
> producer, I guess I'm not representative of the target audience for
> Ambisonia.

You may not be representative of the target audience of the business
model, but you are certainly representative of the target audience of
the site... both as a consumer, and publisher using the free account.

Maybe the 'free' accounts should be able to publish more than 3
recordings. Maybe you'd like to suggest something which you believe
would be appropriate for a free account?

As a guide, Flickr.com allows 100MB per month of uploads. An unlimited
pro account costs USD25/year.

Ambisonic files are large .... lets say averaging 150MB. So an
equivalent 'free' upload rate would be something like 10 files per
year. Streaming audio files will be around 30MB, so then the question
is how often people will stream the file.

Add to that the fact that Flickr uses disk space in bulk (much
cheaper) ... and you can see how Ambisonia could afford to offer
somethign like 3 files. Maybe I should make that 3 files per year?

As I said previously, I am still doing the spreadsheets ... but I'm
very open to thoughts on how this could work.

> For example, if Aaron Heller receives money through Ambisonia for the
> unspecified American west coast symphony orchestra recordings he's putting
> on Ambisonia, will that put him in a position where he'll simply not publish
> those recordings anymore?

It may well. This is the difficult part. The type of content that gets
published to the site will change.

The lawyer has provided me with a 'rights transfer' document that
allows the artist to give rights to the engineer to publish the work.
An other option is that the artist publishes it themselves.

Each recording, in the new site, has both an 'artist' and a 'recording
engineer' associated with it.

That said, I doubt that the unspecified American west coast symphony
orchestra will agree to publish their work ... at least not initially.
If the new site is successful, classical orchestras may see it as a
means to access new audiences.

> Also, if people have to pay to put content, they'll think they're entitled
> to a certain level of service.

That's actually precisely the aim of introducing a business model. Its
not for me to make money (I doubt there'll be much money coming in)
... its for me to be able to dedicate more time to maintaining the
site, or to pay a developer to maintain it. To grow it .... take it to
the next level. The current site has been rotting at the edges for a
long time and has lost much audience due to its poor level of service.
Its 'earn or die'.

The new site has taken me around 2 years to build... squeezing in one
hour here, one hour there. If there was just a little bit of income
coming in it will make a huge impact on the quality of the site.

Lastly, I am optimistic, but cautiously so, about the role that
patrons will play in financially sustaining both the site and
uploaders.

Etienne