Hello there, and welcome to the fourth Stanza blog post of 2024! Another three weeks have slipped by, and it’s time to update the public on what is happening behind the scenes.
Kirby has been doing a lot of work with contracts. The main thing that he has been doing is generating and sending out contracts to copyright holders. We already have over forty of them signed and we thank those who have done so. However, there are quite a few that have not been signed yet. We strongly encourage those of you who have received a link to sign a contract to take just a little time and do so. I signed one last week and it took almost no time at all. Here’s how it works: You receive an email with a link to the contract. Once you click on the link to review and sign, you should be able to click or tap the box where your name goes. A popup should appear where you can either type in your name or use the option to draw it via touchscreen. Hit the button to complete, and you should be done! If you have any questions or run into something unusual, just let us know. We want to have your songs on Stanza, and we need your signature to be able to display them. Please note that if you have multiple coauthors, you will receive multiple contracts to sign! Make sure you sign each of the contracts that you receive.
Of the 1,382 songs that we currently have entered into our database (thanks again to Savanna for her continued efforts in song entry), more than 700 of them are either under contract or are public domain. So we have more than 700 songs officially signed and sealed for Stanza, and hopefully a lot more coming on as copyright owners get their contracts signed. Jed is also continuing to typeset more public domain songs to add to our collection.
Another thing that Kirby has been working with is straightening out some songs whose authors are deceased. For those songs, the copyright owner is now someone like the author’s spouse, and Kirby had to go back and label them individually as such. I gathered that it was kind of a pain. In the future, we want to have that set up to be easier to do when entering songs. We’d like to have a way to link an author to a separate copyright holder in our system. This would also be very useful when we start dealing with big copyright companies that have lots of authors associated with them.
In the last blog post I talked about beta testing and hoped that we could fill this blog post with info about it. As you can see, we’re not there yet, but we are getting close. Some estimate that the current app build is 90% ready. There are still a few issues that will stand out to every beta tester, and we want to get those things fixed. We’ll keep you posted about it. There will probably be an entire blog post devoted to the subject of beta testing in the near future.
Also related to beta testing: we’re still getting our subscription stuff to work. We want everything to be as real-world as possible when we send the app out to be tested. We won’t charge beta testers to use the app, but we do want to track uses and pay royalties to authors during the testing period. So if you want some royalties, sign your contract for us 🙂
As stated in the last post, we have hired an Android developer, but he has not started building the app yet. We trust that he will begin as soon as he can.
That’s all for now! Thank you for your continued patience and support of Stanza.
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