About Musiknet

Musiknet was conceived in the fall of 1995 as an independent project under the auspices of The Swedish National School Board (Skolverket), The Royal Academy of Music (KMH) and Sweden's Public Broadcasting Corporation (SR) in co-operation with Shortlist Audio, a commercial music and post production facility in Stockholm.

Major funding was provided by a grant from The Foundation for Competence and Knowledge (KKS). Additional support came in the form of free office space and the use of sound studios at Shortlist, a consultant fee paid by the National School board and sponsorship from Sweden's major internet provider, Tele2. In addition contributions of equipment and software were made by Fujutsi and Microsoft and our fibre cable connection was donated by Stokab, Stockholm City's cable company

Musiknet's homepage opened for the public in June 1996 and quickly received recognition in the Swedish media. Musiknet is now run as an independent not-for-profit educational foundation which answers to a board of directors where representatives from the founding institutions are members.

Musiknet's existence stands upon two major tenants.

One. That the Internet will one day be a major distribution channel for all media from text to motion pictures and that the internet and it's subsequent developments will provide an economic basis for the transmission of content which falls outside the traditional realm of broadcasting.

That interests and endeavours, which when seen from a geographical perspective are minorities, become in a network which disregards distance, majorities.

For this to happen there must be an almost universal access to the network where these activities take place and there must be a bandwidth which will accommodate the abundance of material which will be produced.

Today neither of these qualifications are met. In Sweden where Musiknet has been active for over a year only one third of our 5000 music teachers have access to our site on a daily basis and of course downloading CD quality music recordings is not a viable option for most of these teachers at this time.

We assume that in due course an internet connection will be as commonplace as a telephone and that bandwidth will exist in abundance and we plan our future after this premise

Today we try to reach out to those without internet connections through exposure in mass media and through trade and union papers. And of course we try to encourage them to get a connection.

The audio material we gather is always recorded at CD quality since we believe that one day it will come to use in that format. Until then we experiment freely with the flora of compression codes available. Though we at the present time utilise the proprietary code of RealAudio due to it's widespread popularity on the net we support the implementation of universal non-proprietary standards.

Back to