Charitable giving in music tends to be emotional, which is understandable and also how a lot of money ends up funding galas instead of artists. The frameworks used to evaluate giving elsewhere — measurable outcomes, cost per outcome, counterfactual impact — apply here perfectly well.
Four questions worth asking any music nonprofit
- What specifically does a dollar buy? "Supporting artists" is not an outcome. "Paying a session musician a scheduled rate" is.
- What happens if you do not fund it? If the work would happen anyway, your money is displacing, not creating.
- How much of the spend reaches the stated outcome, and how much is overhead? Overhead is not evil — infrastructure is real — but it should be disclosed.
- Is the output permanent or perishable? A tool, a curriculum, or a recording persists. A one-off event does not.
Applying that to us
All Our Sound exists to remove cost from creative practice: free software, free instruction, and paid work for artists. To date the organisation has employed three artists, and expanding that number is the primary use of any money we raise.
Free access still requires paid work behind it. Support pays artist fees, software development, hosting and distribution, documentation and course production, and the legal and operational basics that keep a nonprofit compliant. Those are the line items — if any of them stop being funded, something that is currently free stops being free.
The standard we want held to us
Every tool we release stays free permanently, with documentation and a license attached. Every artist we work with is paid. Every claim we make on this site should be checkable. If we ever stop meeting that, the right response is to fund someone who does.
