Sorry about that last post. Somebody let Kent loose on the website, and by the time he was found, he had written an entire blog post. Something about cups or some such nonsense. Anyway, I’m back now.
Really, though, I’m glad that Kent has agreed to write some of these posts. We board members have been talking, and we agree that in the future we would like to post a Stanza update every two weeks. These posts will likely be shorter than the previous ones (unless Kent is writing) and we will use them to keep you informed about what we are currently working on, as well as answering frequent questions and explaining some of our ideas in more detail.
Many have asked about the difference between Stanza and SongMecca. SongMecca is a website for authors to publish their songs independently, and it has become almost completely a place for new and untested songs. Stanza will be a collection of all the previously published shape note gospel songs that we can get permission to distribute. We especially want to preserve the old songs that are hard to obtain and make them easy to access. There is a good possibility that we will publish new songs on Stanza in the future, but unlike on SongMecca they will go through a reviewing process. To put it simply, SongMecca is a publishing site for new songs and Stanza will be a distribution app for previously published songs. Taylor has some thoughts to share on all of this, and he will likely be writing one of the next few blog posts.
Our main topic of discussion lately has been about creating a contract to present to copyright holders. We’re still refining our exact payment amounts and figuring out the legal details. We will be paying copyright holders a few cents for every use of their song, defined as a certain length of time that the song is viewed. The money from subscriptions will go to paying the copyright holders, and we need to find the right balance so that we can offer an affordable subscription without going bankrupt. There are many subscription-based apps and streaming services currently in use, and there are also websites for purchasing sheet music, but to our knowledge no one has attempted to do sheet music streaming before. This means that we can’t necessarily just take an established model of royalty payment and apply it directly to Stanza. We are basing our payment system partly off of established models, but to some extent we are breaking new ground in this area. There is also the question of printing songs from the app. When you print a song, it is a reproduction of that work, not just a “stream” of it. There is more potential for copyright abuse when a song is printed, so we will have to pay the copyright holder more in that instance. We want to find the best way to minimize copyright abuse and get copyright holders paid fairly. We are reaching out to some established songwriters and those who have experience in the publishing world to get their thoughts on the matter, and we hope before too long to have a contract ready for the copyright holders.
Numerous people have reached out to us with offers of help, and we thank you for your willingness. We are not currently accepting applications, but we will certainly reach out for assistance if we need you in the future.
If you have questions, concerns, or general inquiries you can contact us by going to https://stanzamusic.org/contact/ or messaging one of us listed on https://stanzamusic.org/about/. And, as always, our donations are still open at https://stanzamusic.org/donate/. Thank you for sticking with us on our journey so far!
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