Android App, Printing, and Beta Testing

  Good day to all of our loyal readers. Thank you again for your support of and interest in Stanza! Progress is continuing, with good news from the Android front, improvements to the iOS version, decisions on print royalties, and a beta testing teaser. Let’s get into it.

   First off, we finally have an Android version of Stanza! While this is exciting news, you must remember that, naturally, it is still in a very early stage and has a long way to go. There are a lot of features that still need to be built in and likely the process of building, testing, and debugging will take a while. Nevertheless, we are very happy that the Android app is catching up to the iOS version. Our Android developer is working hard on the project. It is my personal hope that we will be able to widely release them at the same time, but that remains to be seen. 

   In other news, we printed from the iOS app for the first time a few weeks ago! This is a big development, because obviously you being able to print songs from Stanza is a very important part of this project. Printing won’t be available to beta testers for a while, though. We’re still perfecting it. We’ve also been talking about print royalties. We wish that we could offer you unlimited printing from Stanza, but at this point, we can’t. Each copyrighted song that we have is the sole property of the copyright holder, and they are entitled to a certain royalty fee for every time their song is sung and every time it gets printed. Royalties for printing a song are 7 cents per copy. This means that if you make a wedding choir book from Stanza with 16 songs in it and make 25 books, you’ve printed 400 physical copies and Stanza Music must pay the author 28 dollars. If you do these same calculations for a youth rally book, the numbers get really high. As you can see, a free printing model would not be sustainable for us. We will, however, be granting each user 5 or 10 free prints a month that do not expire. We haven’t entirely nailed that down. After free prints are used, though, we will be requiring the user to pay the royalties on their prints so that we can afford to pay the authors what they deserve. In the interest of transparency, I’ll tell you that the price will probably be 10 cents per print because of transaction fees and so forth. Public domain songs will, of course, be free to print as much as you like since they no longer have a copyright holder to pay.

   It is important to us that our culture understands that sheet music has an intrinsic value as intellectual property. While a lot of Mennonite authors are probably fine with their music being widely and freely shared, other copyright holders do not take such a carefree view. We want Stanza to be fully legal when it comes to royalty payments and song ownership. If we are, we will be able to get contracts with the big publishing houses and be able to load many thousands more songs on Stanza. We hope this helps you understand the need to pay for mass printing. If you have any questions or concerns about paying print royalties, feel free to contact us or comment on this post. We will do our best to give you an answer. 

   At some point we will be calling for more beta testers so that we can test Stanza at a large scale. There are just a couple more important things we need to get working right before we take that step, otherwise we’ll be getting a lot of reports about the same thing that we already know isn’t working. We will only be taking on iOS users who have donated $75 or more, so now is the time to donate if you want to participate! We will let you know when we want to start signing you up.

   That’s about all for this update. There were a few more things discussed in the past three weeks, like song topics versus song categories such as trio, quartet, etc, the right design for the pitch pipe button, and how to get lots more public domain songs into our database. No big news there, but worth mentioning. There are a lot of small things that go into such a big project. We thank you again for your patience, your support, and your donations as we work to make this great dream a reality.