I'm not sure that really holds much water. Right now, there are a ton of classical recordings available (just under extremely restrictive copyrights). If you

I'm not sure that really holds much water. Right now, there are a ton of classical recordings available (just under extremely restrictive copyrights). If you want to listen to recorded music, it's available. You can go right down to your library and probably find a bigger collection than what Museopen will have for a while. What you can't do is legally use those recordings in films, YouTube videos, etc. (Although de facto you probably can, I don't think enforcement is particularly aggressive.) This is where Museopen changes things. However, I don't think those usages -- the ones prohibited by current copyrights on recordings -- were keeping orchestras alive. At least not most orchestras. Most modern orchestras exist because people want to go to the symphony and listen to live music. They're paying for the experience, not just to listen to a particular piece of music. There are a very small minority of professional orchestras that might be affected by this, I guess ... orchestras who do soundtrack work. But I'm willing to bet that the bulk of their business is playing actual custom-written soundtrack scores, and not playing Beethoven's 9th over and over again for everybody who wants a copy. The downsides to this are really, really limited, as far as I can tell. The net losers are probably the classical labels like RCA and Deutsche Grammophon, who have the big back-catalogs of classical music and license them out, not modern, living musicians.