Hi everyone,

2023 is here and that means it is time for us to grab our year in numbers calculator and show you some statistics about last year’s Freesound activity. As usual, we start by showing some general statistics similar to those shown in previous years’ posts, and at the end we focus on a different aspect of Freesound, which this year has to do with the relation between text queries, sound plays and sound downloads. But let’s start from the beginning. The number of new sounds uploaded during 2022 was…

49,153 new sounds!

which corresponds to…

961 hours of audio!

This number is not as high as in 2021 (which reached a record of 56k new sounds), but it is still 3,000 sounds more than in 2020 and even more than in years before so the number of uploaded sounds is still growing strong (more on that below)! The average duration of sounds has not changed much compared to the previous years, and sits at 70 seconds per sound.

Here is the Creative Commons license distribution of these newly uploaded sounds:

In 2021, we observed that the distribution had shifted a bit in favour of using CC-BY sounds (and in detriment of CC0), but this year we see how the use of CC0 goes back to what it used to be before 2021 and it represents two thirds of the licenses used for new sounds.

With the new additions from 2022, Freesound now currently hosts an amazing total of 581,369 sounds, for a total audio length of 384 days and 9 hours. Here is the evolution of the total number of sounds since the beginning of Freesound, and the prediction for the future that we made last year:

As you can see, we are very slightly below the prediction, but that is to be expected as last year’s prediction would be biased by the record number of newly uploaded sounds. If all goes as expected, we should be closing 2023 with about 650k sounds and reach 700k in 2024.

Here is a tag cloud of the tags of the sounds uploaded during 2022:

The usual big tags are still big (field-recording, music, loop, synth, …), but this year it looks like noise has made a strong entrance in the top tags, partially because of the contributions by Hewn.Marrow who seems to have been exploring noise quite deeply (e.g. see this pack):

Here is the classic chart of the users who have contributed the most sounds in 2022:

	Username	# uploaded sounds		Username	uploaded time (hours)
#1	strangehorizon	3648	#1	klankbeeld	77
#2	Hewn.Marrow	3177	#2	felix.blume	38
#3	Duisterwho	1827	#3	kyles	30
#4	josefpres	1583	#4	Philip_Goddard	28
#5	klankbeeld	1197	#5	tim.kahn	27
#6	kyles	1167	#6	TheRandomSoundByte2637	24
#7	The_Sample_Workshop	860	#7	KevinSonger	20
#8	storyofthelie	716	#8	josefpres	19
#9	DiscordantScraps	475	#9	kevp888	19
#10	felix.blume	464	#10	W1ZY	15
#11	nlux	333	#11	juandbermudez	11
#12	Alba_Mac	309	#12	USBMED_Ambiences_Sound_Library	10
#13	SuddenDice	292	#13	Garuda1982	9
#14	Erokia	289	#14	dibko	8
#15	kevp888	286	#15	jose.viana	8
#16	N0IZ	282	#16	TRP	8
#17	e0fd96	265	#17	Hewn.Marrow	8
#18	deadrobotmusic	238	#18	e0fd96	8
#19	dibko	235	#19	Duisterwho	7
#20	frenkfurth	218	#20	strangehorizon	7

Thanks everyone (not only those appearing in the table) for all the contributions! It is absolutely incredible to see that many new and high-quality sounds being uploaded every year 🙂

And what about downloads? The number of sound downloads (including packs) during 2022 was…

23,688,268 downloads!

This is even more than in 2020, when we observed a significant increase of downloads which we attributed to the increase of visitors due to COVID-19 lockdowns. All in all, users have downloaded more than 215M sounds and packs from Freesound!

The term-cloud below shows the most common query terms that have been used when searching in Freesound during 2022:

The top 10 terms are the same as in previous years, with slight variations in the ordering: rain, wind, explosion, music, footsteps, piano, fire, thunder, whoosh, and woosh. Approximately a thousand users search for the sounds of rain and wind every day! Also interesting is the use of both whoosh and woosh. According to the dictionary, the first spelling is used as a verb and the second one as a noun. Both are therefore correct, but Freesound does not use intelligence to somehow “link” the two terms. Maybe this is something to improve in the future!

Now some extra general statistics: In 2022, you sent 17k messages, wrote 1.2k forum posts, added 174k sound ratings, and made 49k sound comments. These numbers are decreasing with respect to the previous years in which we saw a big increase that we attributed to COVID-19 lockdowns. This behaviour was somehow predicted last year and now we see that these “community activity” indicator are close to what we observed in 2019.

And now, to conclude this blog post, we will provide some statistics about sound plays (i.e. every time you listen to a sound while browsing Freesound), sound downloads and their relation to user queries and data transferred. If we take the total number of sound downloads in 2022 shown above we can easily see that this means a rate of 2,700 sounds downloaded every hour. But have you ever wondered how many sounds are being played every hour in Freesound? Well, this varies a lot depending on the time of the year and it is actually difficult to estimate even for us, but after some number crunching we have estimated that 8,600 sounds are being played every hour. This could be interpreted so that for every sound downloaded, approximately 3 sounds have been previewed before. What might be more surprising however is that if we look at the number of user queries per hour, we see that about 6,500 text queries are made every hour, which means that only 1.3 sounds are played per user query, and also means that at least a 60% of the queries result in no sounds being downloaded. All in all, considering all sound downloads and sound plays, our severs stream about 2TB of information per day. If you look at the blog post from last year (2021 in numbers), it was actually briefly mentioned that the amount of data transferred was 1TB per day, but our estimate for this year has doubled. This could be due to having wrong estimates in the previous year, but will also be most likely related to our changes in the downloads infrastructure which allowed for much better download speeds and might have therefore resulted in overall higher amount of data transferred every day.

That’s it for this year’s post, thanks for reading and we hope you enjoy a 2023 full of sounds 🙂

frederic, on behalf of the Freesound Team