 A huge amount of open and reusable audio content exists on the Internet. This not only includes music and sound clips recorded by Internet users, but also audio, whose copyright has expired. Nevertheless, the creative industries do not have easy ways of reusing this content and end up creating their own. Why is that? How can we make all this sound and music content easily reusable by the creative industries and audio professionals alike? This is precisely the goal of the Audio Commons Initiative. Open sound and music content is scattered around the web and it's sometimes annotated with poor metadata. This makes it hard to search and find open audio. We aim at providing a single entry point to access different sources of open audio content, making it easier for users and developers to access open audio. Furthermore, our technology is able to automatically analyze and understand sound and music so that we can make it searchable in meaningful ways. Sometimes the reuse possibilities for audio content are unclear and it is hard to answer questions like, can I use this sound commercially? We have adopted Creative Commons licenses as a standard way to clearly define what can be done and what can't be done with audio content. Creative Commons licenses provide a standardized way of granting copyright permissions to the creative works of individual creators, large companies and institutions. We aim at facilitating re-licensing procedures for open audio content so it can easily and safely be reused in both commercial and non-commercial applications, granting special permissions when needed. The reuse of open audio content will help in shortening the gap between content creators and content users, reducing the production costs for creative industries and contributing to a more sustainable ecosystem for audio sharing. To bring these ideas to life, we are developing technology to support an ecosystem of users, services, tools and open audio content. We call this the Audio Commons ecosystem. This allows developers to easily create tools that access different sources of open audio content. Licensing services are also part of the ecosystem, thus facilitating the re-licensing of content. We are a mixture of academic and industry partners with complementary expertise in the audio world. Nevertheless, the initiative is open to new partners and has a will to grow beyond the boundaries of the current consortium. Would you like to know more about it? Check out our website to learn all about our tools and technologies.