Hi Robert and other PS associates,

Have you interested to sell your pianosociety site to private interested party? or shares?

If so, what sorts of cost involved? or PM me.

why this question?

probably because of the success of this site

I suppose, some of us would like to buy the PS, if not part of shares would be nice.

PS is a nonprofit site, so I don't know what kind of shares you would be buying. (Assuming "shares" means sharing of the ownership and "profits")

perhaps for the hobby sake....?

I can't see why anyone would want to buy it unless they wanted to control it, or make a profit from it, which would sort of go against the whole point of Piano Society, which is supposed to make classical music available to everyone, including those who cannot or would not spend money on it.

Agreed.
Now this said,I have proposed a few times for Robert and Techneut to propose two versions: gold(for those of us interested)which could be a monthly fee of like $5 or $10 and a free version for everyone else

Yes, but doing that means you have to seriously limit the options now available for free. I understand it might be necessary if donations and ads cannot keep PS afloat, but I don't see it being done unless it really gets desperate.

ok ,,,money is not everything, you only live once and if you can acheive your goal just like your music, we should all do it. It does not matter either made profit or not. This is not the point. The point is have a goal in your life....and enjoy it.

below is a link to my sisters site, and she is generous to fund her own site.

http://www.tintinologist.org/ please enjoy.

Ahhhh!!!

That is pretty much the one thing that bothers me more than anything else in cyber space!!!

I'm personally a big supporter of open source, GPL'd, free to all software, and those thoughts carry over into your idea of premium fees as well. I am a firm believer that people should be free to make donations whenever possible, but that charging service fees only lead to shutting people out of something that should remain open and free to all

... but back to the question of buying the site:

I personally don't understand why somebody would want to do that. But I suppose everybody must have their own ideas and reasons for everything.

I have a lifetime premium account at one website I go to, and I don't mind it, because all of the perks that you get with it are additions to the original purpose of the site. What was suggested for Piano Society, if I remember correctly, is that non-gold members only be allowed to download so many files a day or something like that. And I can understand if Piano Society eventually is forced to go to that because there is not enough money from ads and donations to maintain the bandwidth necessary to support all of those downloads - I just think that premium accounts should be a last resort, and I think that Robert et al. agree.

But to me, even that is too far. The idea of download limits bothers me to no end. Especially considering that sometimes people click the wrong links, and download something they didn't want, and it still counts towards their limit. That's happened to me before at sites like the Sheet Music Archive.

But still... since that's a last resort kinda thing... I'm gonna shut up now and go to bed.
*And with a swish of his black cloak of Hell, he is off, into the wonders of a demonic dream world*

Problem is, it costs money to run a site like Piano Society - a good bit more than most websites, because of the download traffic. If premium accounts is the only way to keep Piano Society alive, they why complain? You might come here one day to find your downloads limited, but that's better than coming here one day to find that Piano Society is gone altogether.

I have discussed this with Robert on a few occasions. The nature of PS is more to try and get people to voluntarily part with their money. And many of them do, though it does still not cover the expenses. But it goes some way, and as long as that is the case we did not feel like imposing charges on membership or download.