Independent Music Publishers
Seller's FAQBasic Concepts for SellersHow Does imusicpubs Work?How Do I Get Paid? How Much Does This Cost? What Other Fees Are There? Marketing and Business QuestionsHow do you intend to market the website?Can music schools and students use the website? I have a whole book of songs I sell. Should I put the whole book or individual songs? I have a student method book I want to sell. Can I sell that here? Can you tell us something about your business plan? Seller RegistrationWhy are you asking for my Social Security number?What are all these Terms of Use agreements I'm required to check off on? Why are you asking for Next of Kin? I'm not planning on dying anytime soon. Why am I being asked for my company name? I'm not a company. What are all these Terms of Use agreements I'm required to check off on? Copyright IssuesWhat is copyright?How am I protected? Tech IssuesFirefox doesn't work.I just tried to upload my pdf files. It gets to 95% and then fails. Basic Concepts for SellersHow Does imusicpubs Work?Buyers download music in pdf file format and print music directly on their own printers. For buyers who do not wish to do their own printing, there will be an option to purchase music in printed form. When this kind of transaction happens, an e-mail message is generated to a business partner, such as Copy Central, who will print the music and mail it out. An appropriate printing fee will be assessed and added to the sale price. Sellers must upload their sheet music in pdf format. If you're a new seller here, please download the Seller's manual and read through it. Sound files may also be uploaded which will help buyers to make a buying decision. How Do I Get Paid? You will be paid by check mailed to your home address. Once a quarter we process all payments. If you are due more than $50, you'll get a statement listing all of what you sold and a check. If you are due less than $50, then we'll just roll it over to the next quarter. How Much Does This Cost? We charge a 15% commission on all sales of sheet music. About 5% of the 15% goes to cover the cost of the credit transaction, plus the cost of processing payment to you. It is the intent of IMP to take a 10% commission on all sales. Given that the music industry has always done it the other way around, where you as the seller get 10% to 15%, and they take 85% and more, this is how it should be. What Other Fees Are There? There are no other fees to use the site. Marketing and Business QuestionsHow do you intend to market the website?I expect to market the site through three different avenues: 1. Search engine visibility. I've engaged a specialist in doing the engineering to make a site more visible to search engines. Remember that when you're on the Internet, anywhere on the planet that people have credit cards is your marketplace. I recently had a sale to a buyer in Japan who wanted a string quartet he couldn't find anywhere else. 2. Print advertising. I'm going to carefully target this expenditure as it is VERY expensive. I see the initial important target markets to be: Beyond that there is chamber music, but I won't work towards that market until the first two are well established. I do believe that the most important market is church music. 3. Guerrilla marketing. This is done through e-mail mining and mailing to the above designated target audiences and through social networking on the Internet. Can music schools and students use the website? Anyone is free to post sheet music for sale. Remember that there are NO fees for anything other than the 15% commission when something is actually sold. I would like to encourage students and schools to make use of the site. Aside from the notion that they might actually make some money, students are also an important target market to sell to. I have a whole book of songs I sell. Should I put the whole book or individual songs? One of the features of the site is that you can upload a single sound file per piece of music you present. You upload any kind of sound file, up to 40 MB in size, and we convert it an mp3, limit it to 1 minute in length with a 5 second fade out at the end. Having something to listen to significantly helps a buyer to choose to make a purchase. That's a feature that most sheet music sites don't have at all. But if you have 20 to 50 songs in a songbook, then how do you represent all of those songs with only one sound file? Here's one way to handle this question. You could upload the whole songbook as a single large pdf file, with one sound file. This would be one item for sale. Then you could also upload each song separately, as a separate song to be purchased, and each song has its own sound file. That way, a buyer could hear as many songs as they like, and then choose to purchase the whole songbook. As an example, you could price it something like $4/song, or $40 for the whole book of 30 songs. Price it so that you actually make some decent money for selling a couple of songs and then have the volume price of the whole song book be a very good value for a buyer who is willing to make that choice. I have a student method book I want to sell. Can I sell that here? Of course you can. If you can put it in pdf format and put a price on it, then you can list it here. Can you tell us something about your business plan? To begin with, I intend to re-invest all revenue from the site back into further engineering to make the site more useful and into further marketing. I expect the site to grow and to be used in ways I can't begin to imagine. Long term I hope that the site will be used to publish and sell the traditional music of the world. There are thousands of distinct cultures and peoples on the planet and they all have their traditional music and songs. I'm sure that little of it has been written down and even less of it is available to purchase as sheet music. It is my hope that Independent Music Publishers will create a way for this to happen. We really are becoming a global village. People travel all over the planet to work. You can find all nationalities of people living and working everywhere. If you're from the Phillipines and are working on an oil rig in the Persian Gulf, where are you going to find the traditional songs of your homeland to play on your guitar? Remember, our motto is, Be of service first. I honestly believe that this website can be of great service to both composers and buyers. All you have to do is use it. Seller RegistrationWhy are you asking for my Social Security number?If you're a seller, then we'll need to get your SS# (or EIN# if you're a business) for IRS purposes before we can pay you. What are all these Terms of Use agreements I'm required to check off on? Why are you asking for Next of Kin? I'm not planning on dying anytime soon. Few of us ever plan on dying, but sooner or later, we all do. The more information you can provide here (and keep up to date), the more likely we'll be able to pay whoever is next in line to be paid what is owed your estate. Why am I being asked for my company name? I'm not a company. You may not be a company, but some people do create business entities to sell their work. Copyright IssuesDisclaimer: All comments here about Copyright are NOT to be construed as actual legal advice. This is just stuff copied from elsewhere on the Internet. Serious concerns and questions about copyright should be directed to a knowledgeable copyright attorney.What is Copyright? From the US Copyright Office: "Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. Code) to the authors of 'original works of authorship,' including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works." It is suggested that you visit the U.S. Government Copyright Office website. It's chock full of useful documentation. Highly recommended! How am I protected? All pdf files that buyers download will have their personal information electronically embedded in them. If you find your work being sold or otherwise being distributed without your permission, you can extract the buyer information from the pdf file to know whom to hold responsible. Copyright is only as strong as your ability to defend it. Tech IssuesFirefox doesn't work. You may have disabled accepting cookies in your Firefox configuration. You can fix this either by accrpting cookies or by setting imusicpubs.com to be an exception, thus allowing cookies from this site.I just tried to upload my pdf files. It gets to 95% and then fails.This happens when you don't put anything in the "Description" field for each pdf file when you're filling out the pdf file upload dialogue. |
Composer of the week
Henry Pool
Henry Pool is born on June 12, 1939 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, as the second of four siblings, all boys. His family suffered with the rest of the Dutch nation the horrors or the Second World War. After the war he went to elementary school, high school and teachers’ seminary. He worked seven years as a teacher in Amsterdam, then emigrated to Israel. After a short sojourn in kibbutz Sha’alvim he joined begin 1967 a Rabbinical College in Netivot. In 1969 he married Lilette Sroussi, a girl from Paris, France, who emigrated to Israel in 1968. During the years the couple has been blessed with five children. In 1974 they moved to Jerusalem, where he started to work as a graphic artist. In 1988 they emigrated to the USA, where they still live, now as American citizens. In the USA he worked as a computer operator. In 2004 he retired. His career as an composer has been a difficult one. Beside one year (at age 8) of piano lessons he never got any professional training. He has learned by playing the piano, studying the compositions he played, listening to classical radio and recordings and from books on composition, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, etc.. His first compositions were written in some late-romantic impressionistic way. Later he destroyed all of them, because he found his own style, which is a modern classic-romantic one with elements of the Jewish music, which explains, why he is using different modes, like the dorian, the phrygian, the lydian and the mixolydian, beside de standard major and minor. So, a composition in C-so is written in the mixolydian (the so-) mode on the absolute scale of C. Certainly there are also elements coming from his native country, the Netherlands, while new elements, coming from the American musical world are now entering his musical language. |
