Category Archives: Blessays

Doing Business: Virtual Shelf Space

Monday, August 29, 2011

This post originally appeared on the NewMusicShelf blog on August 6, 2011.

Virtual shelf space is a wonderful thing.

In a brick-and-mortar music store, of which there are sadly becoming less and less, shelf space is at a premium – a physical store can only hold so much physical sheet music. Of course, most music stores are now given over to instrument sales and rentals and audio equipment. Sheet music, if there is any, is relegated to a dark corner, and usually limited to the easy piano/vocal songbook of either X album by Y pop star or the latest Disney movie musical. In terms of concert music, you might find some Beethoven sonatas; possibly some Liszt; probably the Well-Tempered Klavier.

The new stuff – the stuff that you and I write – doesn’t have much of a chance there, unfortunately. Plus, you’re limited to sales in a single location if you even manage to get some of that premium physical shelf space for your own works.

A physical shelf can only hold so many scores. In a bookstore, you’ll notice that some books are faced spine out, and others are turned so that you see the full front cover. Those that are turned out are meant to sell well – new releases, intended bestsellers, whatever the publisher had decided needs to sell a lot this month. By being turned out, they’re given more shelf space – more prime real estate – because they’re supposed to get noticed. The spine-out books take more of an effort to look through because each book takes up less space, and you also have to tilt your head to the right to read the title and author. Here, those authors who have more books on the shelf, and are consequently taking up more real estate, will get noticed more and sell better. Scores, however, because of their size, never really get the luxury of facing cover out.

With digital scores, however, shelf space is virtual. And virtual shelf space is unlimited.

With virtual shelf space, as with physical shelf space, you want to take up as much as possible. People who are looking for scores may pass over the lone piece by So-And-So wedged amongst the rest of the scores on a shelf, be it in a physical location or online. The more you have available, the more likely you are to be noticed, and the more likely you are to be checked out and hopefully bought.

Think of it in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio. Your music is the signal, and everyone else’s is the noise. (This isn’t a value judgment on anyone’s music, obviously.) You want people to get your signal despite all the noise trying to drown it out. A weak signal – i.e., having only one or two scores available – isn’t likely to get you noticed. It’s certainly possible, but you’re more likely to be noticed if you have five pieces or ten pieces or your entire catalog available in any given market.

“Any given market?” you ask. By market, I’m not referring to the broader (albeit fairly small) “market” for concert music scores. Instead, I mean a virtual location. Your website is one of them. NewMusicShelf is another. If you have only one piece available through the NewMusicShelf, at this moment (there are 271 scores/parts available, and another 12 being added this weekend) you make up less than one third of one percent of the total available works/total shelf space. If, like me, you have about 40 scores/sets of parts available, you take up around 15% of the shelf space – you’re much more likely to be seen as visitors click around the site. Right now Allen Brings takes up the most shelf space on NewMusicShelf with a whopping 139 scores – that’s 51% of the current virtual shelf space on the site. I do recommend you check out his stuff.

I should also add: with my signal-to-noise analogy, I’m not implying that you don’t want people buying other composers’ scores. Whether they buy someone else’s music or not is a neutral matter. All you’re aiming for is to get your music in front of them and into their hands.

So my advice for today to composers is this: wherever you’re able to make it happen, take up as much of the virtual shelf space as you can. Make yourself visible. When you write something, put it on your website, put it here, make sure people can find it.

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Pricing: A Practical Approach

Monday, August 22, 2011

This post originally appeared on the NewMusicShelf blog on June 10, 2011.

In an effort to make pricing my scores easier and less subjective, I’ve been tinkering with a series of formulas to tell me what I should charge, and I think I’ve come up with some good stuff.

However, before I get into the math of it, I want to quickly paraphrase my post Pricing: The Goldilocks Zone where I talk about my philosophy on setting prices. Until now, I’ve set mine by asking myself two questions: 1) “If I were buying an identical score by another composer, what price would be most attractive to me?” and 2) “Is that price something I’m willing to accept for my own work?” It’s worked well so far, but is hardly objective.

I actually designed a whole Excel spreadsheet that does double duty as my catalog and a price calculator. All I have to do is plug in what it costs to print one copy of the score, and it spits out what I should charge for print scores on one sheet, and what I should charge for electronic scores on another. It took me an afternoon to create, and is a lot of fun to play with.

Let’s walk through an example of how the formulas work with a bit of math. For this example, I’m going to assume that the score costs exactly $5.00 to print and bind, and that there are no other costs associated with the production of the score itself. Your score will cost more or less depending on the number of pages and the quality of the materials. But for right now, we’re going to take $5.00 as our starting point.

The other assumption we’re going to make, aside from the starting cost, is that we want our works picked up by distributors like J.W. Pepper or Theodore Front; so we’re going to figure in the discount that distributors take, which is typically around 40%.

Print Scores
So we start out with our $5.00 cost to produce the score.

Step one is just about the only subjective step in the print pricing process: figuring out our base profit per score. This can be a set dollar amount, or a percentage of the sale. I prefer the latter because it’s flexible, and it helps keep the final price more reasonable.

For myself, I’ve chosen a 20% base profit*. Meaning: 20% of the price after adding the base profit to the printing costs. Not 20% of the printing price.

So: “Cost with Profit” = $5.00 + (20% of “Cost with Profit”).

The easiest way to figure this is to subtract your percentage from 100% and turn it into a decimal: 100% – 20% = 80% or 0.8.

Then divide your cost by this new number: $5.00 / 0.8 = $6.25.

I may have lost some of you already. Let’s do it backward to show you what just happened. 20% of $6.25 is $1.25. So we have our $5.00 printing cost plus our 20% ($1.25) base profit.

Cost with Profit = $5.00 + (20% of Cost with Profit)
$6.25 = $5.00 + $1.25

Good? Good.

Step two: we add the distributor discount, which is typically 40%. We add this into our price because we have to price our scores the same as the distributor sells them. The discount they take is their incentive for buying scores from you, as well as their profit. Why is theirs twice what mine is? Because they have a staff and I don’t.

So, we do the same trick to calculate the distributor price that we used to get our Cost with Profit.

$6.25 / (100% – 40%) = $10.42

C w/ P & Disc = $6.25 + (40% of C w/ P & Disc)
$10.42 = $6.25 + $4.17

One final step, just for the sake of aesthetics. Let’s round up to $10.50. It’s just a prettier number.

So there’s your print price for a score that cost you $5.00 to print.

If a distributor wants to sell this score, you sell it to them for $6.25 per copy (or $6.30 since we rounded up, and that counts for something), and they sell it for $10.50. Of the $6.30 you got from the distributor, you paid $5.00 to print it, and end up earning $1.30 – your Base Profit!

To sell it on your site, you sell it for $10.50 and make $5.50 after your production costs. Awesome.

A quick recap:

Printing Costs: $5.00
Base Profit (20% of Price net of distributor discount, or 12% of Gross) $1.25
Discount (40% of Gross) $4.17
Final Gross $10.42
Rounded Gross $10.50

* The base profit here is not 20% of the gross price, but 20% of the price net of the distributor’s discount. I figure it this way to keep the price more affordable. See “Another Approach” below for an example of how calculating the base profit against gross affects the gross price.

Electronic Scores
So let’s start with our final Print price of $10.50 and go from there to find the price for our Electronic score.

We have a few options of how we want to deal with this. You’re entitled to keep the same price, but I don’t particularly approve of that since you have no printing/binding costs for an electronic score.

I prefer to just subtract out the printing costs, so $10.50 – $5.00, leaving you with $5.50, which is pretty damned good for a product with no overhead costs.

Some other composers take half of the print price, which in this case would be $5.25. A negligible difference between this and what I do.

Assuming you sell the electronic scores on your own site and use PayPal as your payment solution, you’re going to pay $0.46 on $5.50, leaving you with a net of $5.04.

Or you can set your price taking the PayPal fee into account. If you want to net $5.50, you can set your price at $6.00 and net $5.53.

If you were to use NewMusicShelf as your distributor, the fee is 14% of the gross price plus the PayPal transaction fee (2.9% + $0.30). So if you want to end up with $5.50, you’ll set your price at $7.00 to account for the $0.98 NewMusicShelf distribution fee and $0.50 PayPal transaction fee, and you’ll net $5.52. (To start at $5.50, you’ll have a total of $1.23 in fees and net $4.27.)

Obviously there are lots of choices here, and a lot of wiggle room. There’s no overhead to take into account, although there are various transaction fees that you might pay, depending on where and how you sell your electronic scores.

Another approach
Another approach that can be taken is to calculate the base profit and the distributor discount together. This changes the price because the profit in the example above is not calculated against the final gross price. Instead, it is only calculated taking into account the overhead costs. Calculating the profit and discount together looks like this:

Gross = $5.00 + (20% Gross) + (40% Gross)

Or

Gross = $5.00 + (60% Gross)

$5.00 / 0.4 = Gross

$5.00 / 0.4 = $12.50

Cost $5.00
Base Profit $2.50
Distributor Discount $5.00
Gross Price $12.50

I prefer not to do it this way because it actually raises the price more than I’m comfortable with. Because I don’t expect to have a print distributor for a while, and because I anticipate selling the bulk of my scores through my own website anyway once I do get one, I’m content for the time being to have a profit of $1.25 on this example score sold through a distributor. After all, I’ll be making a $5.50 profit when it’s sold on my own website.

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Nick Norton’s RSS Feed

Friday, June 24, 2011

Yesterday afternoon, composer Nick Norton, with whom I’ve had an email correspondence for at least a year, linked to a blog post from his Twitter account. The post started with one of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, which I read religiously. I was, obviously, hooked on Nick’s blog. Jerry McGuire may have had whatsherface at “hello”, but Nick had me at “T-Rex”. I needed to have his blog in my gigantic pool of Google Reader subscriptions.

The only problem was that Nick didn’t have an RSS or Atom feed to subscribe to.

So, I did what any web-obsessed person would do: sent Nick a Tweet asking if he had a feed. This, as I’m standing on the corner of 142nd St & Riverside, overnight bags at my feet, waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up to spend a long weekend at his parents’ house in Montauk. (Rough life, huh?) What would I do without a smartphone, to ask such pressing questions?

It turned out that, no, Nick’s site was sans RSS, despite his blog being prominent on the site. Nick uses Frog CMS (seriously, Nick, dump the Frog – it’s not worth the trouble), which I’d never heard of. As a semi-serious web designer, that was a pretty major red flag. Frog also – let me digress for a moment – hasn’t had a new stable release since April 2009, which tells me that it’s essentially defunct.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, and I genuinely love helping out my fellow composers, I said, “Let me research this and get back to you.”

By the time we got to Bridgehampton, I had it all planned out in my brain: use PHP to create an XML file from the blog info in his MySQL database, and run a Cron job every hour to update it. Or, in layman’s terms: Use a bunch of acronyms and jargon to do magical things. Then we got to the house, unloaded the cat, had a few drinks and watched some episodes of the Ricky Gervias Show on HBOGo before crashing.

Morning came. Ok, late morning came. Ok, almost noon came, and I rolled out of bed, showered, and sat down with the laptop at the dining room table (i.e., my Montauk office). Several hours of work later, I realized that my initial plan was, in effect, stupid. It wasn’t going to work for reasons that I don’t want to talk about, largely because it’s boring and I’d like to spare your brain cells, Dear Reader.

Fortunately, Nick had sent me the log-on to his site to get things working (mwahahahaha), so I resigned myself to working within the Frog Content Management System to get things done since my original idea wasn’t going to work. *Sigh*

After several more hours, interrupted by giving the cat a bath, nearly drowning in the torrential rains while attempting to get lunch, and making dinner for the family, I finally – at 11pm – and in the past-tense words of Tim Gunn – made it work. You don’t really want to know how, even though it involves none of the XML/Cron/MySQL stuff (though it did involve some PHP, and working with code like “$this->find()”). Fewer acronyms, just as much magic.

So.

If, like me, you want to read Nick’s blog via Google Reader or whatever aggregator you use, you can now.

And the link is: http://nickwritesmusic.com/rss.

Let me tell ya – that’s a lot of work to go to just to be lazy and not have to check in on the blog regularly.

And while we’re at it…

I made a little change to my own blog recently and added a blogroll. Check it out over to the right. Or, if you’re reading this via Google Reader, come on over to the site and check out the stuff I decided is fun enough to read. I’ve got several categories of sites that I link to: the Blogroll is general stuff, including the NewMusicShelf and articles that I “share” via Google Reader; Composers is pretty straight-forward; Fun Stuff is just that; Gay News, self explanatory; and Publishing Blogs gives you a sense of the stuff that I read that makes me so hardcore about self-publishing and being entrepreneurial.

And say hello to my little Twitter feed just below the blogroll.

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You’re Doing It Right

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Cross-posted from http://NewMusicShelf.com/News.

I want to point out a composition competition that’s making a point of being completely above-board. It’s a nice counter-example to the skeevy one I mentioned in my recent post about composition competitions.

This is from the ACDA Illinois Choral Composition Contest guidelines:

WHAT RIGHTS ARE GRANTED TO ACDA-ILLINOIS?
a) The following dedication must be included in all manuscript and published editions of the winning compositions: “Winner of the 2011 ACDA Illinois Choral Composition Contest”
b) IL-ACDA will have the right to make copies for distribution to the members of the summer 2011 IL- ACDA Directors’ Chorus, its conductor, and accompanist.
c) Each winning composer will be asked to provide biographical information for publicity purposes. IL-ACDA will have the right to use the composer’s name and composition title in the future IL-ACDA Communications.

WHAT RIGHTS ARE GRANTED TO THE COMPOSER?
a) Copyright ownership will be retained by the composer.
b) Publication rights will be retained by the composer.
c) The composer will be given the privilege to display/advertise other compositions at the Summer Retreat.

There’s nothing “slick” here – no one’s trying to dress up a crappy deal in vague, misleadingly positive language. I really appreciate that the ACDA has made a point of spelling out exactly what they expect of the composer, and exactly what the composer can expect of them. ACDA reserves the right to make sufficient copies of the winning score to prepare and perform it. There’s no talk of perpetuity or recording rights. They require that the composer note in the published score that it won the contest – a very reasonable request, especially considering that the works can’t have been performed before, so it’s a safe assumption that most of the entries were written specifically for the competition. And ACDA can use the composer’s name and the title of the winning work on their website, in their newsletter, and in their promotional materials – publicity for the composer.

They’re also not making a grab at the copyright, publication, or mechanical rights, which sometimes happens.

ACDA Illinois: You’re doing it right.

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Speculation

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Allow me to speculate for a moment.

Getting music performed live is difficult. Very difficult. I know because I’ve produced a series of new music concerts in Manhattan for several years, now. It’s a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. A vital one, though.

But I’ve been wondering about the future of concert music. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about audience development and making a career as a composer a financially viable one – viable without resorting to academia as a primary means of income before having established oneself and gained some measure of success solely as a composer.

Can we continue to build our audiences almost solely through live performance, or should we be expanding our public image to a more diverse array of media?

Unlike writers, we can’t spread our musical gospels through printed scores. Scores aren’t for reading on the subway – they are for those who intend to perform our music, or for those who intend to study our music to some academic end – both rarefied pursuits. Granted, our primary targets are and should be performers, the evangelists of our works. But should we not also preach our own gospels? (I don’t know where this religious analogy came from, but it seems to be working….) As I tell all of the composers who join the NewMusicShelf – you are your own best salesman.

To rely on performers to bring our music to the masses requires that we have a solid and enthusiastic base of performers who want to expose their audiences to our works. Enthusiasm is never enough, though. Successfully relying on our performers presupposes that they have their own loyal listenership and plenty of performance opportunities where they are in control of the works that they bring to the stage, neither of which criteria we can rely on always being the case.

So should we, in addition to finding ways to get our works publicly performed, be attempting to record our music and make it widely available? The average new music aficionado may not whip out a score on the subway instead of the latest James Patterson potboiler, but they most likely do whip out their iPod or other similar device capable of playing digital audio. Like novels (I swear, I will run the writer-composer comparison into the ground), people consume recorded music at a fantastic rate. Though unlike novels, recorded music is much quicker to get through, and therefore more easily consumable. It’s also much more easily re-consumed, which often results in a more loyal listenership. And a loyal listenership is often in search of the next release….

The downside here is that recording music at a high level of professional quality is expensive. Prohibitively so. And without a wide listenership, we probably can’t expect a return on our initial financial outlay for a recording project.

Of course, we can defray these costs in a number of different ways.

One way is to involve our existing audience base in the creation of the recording, i.e, fundraising. Inviting friends, family, and other fans of your work to be a part of the creative process by helping to fund the project (notice the careful wording there) can bring them much closer to your work merely by having become literally invested in it. A gracious thanks to your financial supporters in the liner notes of the disc and on the disc’s page on your website can be very gratifying, and these supporters may be more likely to recommend the recording to other music lovers because of their own involvement in its creation.

Another way to keep costs down is to split studio/editing time and costs with other composers, or with performers working on their own recording projects. This approach has its own potential difficulties, not the least of which is the diminished time allotted for your works, but it at least allows for some portion of your music to be recorded for less than it would cost for a whole album’s worth.

The whole recording idea, of course, hinges on the expectation of a return on your investment. I propose this in contrast to the financial outlay for a live performance, which may not earn back in ticket sales what it cost to put on the event, especially since there’s only one chance to earn back that investment, whereas a recording can earn indefinitely.

The point at which you break even on the project will most likely be 5 or more years out, so this truly is an investment in your own career, and should be seen as such. And, like all investments, it should be expected to bring in a return once the up-front costs are paid back through album/MP3 sales.

The math for this sort of project may be a little daunting to some. But bear with me, and let’s take a quick look at some numbers. I promise to be gentle.

Selling a full-length digital album through your own website and using PayPal to handle the transactions (PayPal charges a 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction) leaves you with the following returns:
On a $10.00 digital album: $9.41. Not bad.
On a $0.99 digital track: $0.66. Not horrible.

Now let’s assume that the album costs $8,000 to produce. I’m basing this figure on a recording that I turned pages for last year. It was solo piano music, so performer costs weren’t an issue. It was also done in a well-respected studio in Manhattan, which skewed the price a bit higher. So let’s assume that the lack of performer costs and the NY studio prices cancel each other out, and stick with $8,000 as our number. (By the way, the recording will be released on Naxos American Masters, so that tells you something about the level of quality that was being aimed for – that level of quality being another of the base assumptions for our hypothetical project here.)

Taking these numbers as our base, we would have to sell 850 copies of the full digital album to break even. That’s 170 copies per year over 5 years. A little daunting, maybe, for composers who are still growing their base. But remember that this recording will be available for the rest of your life – it’s an investment. And we can break that number down again to make it even more easily palatable: you would have to sell one copy of the album every 2 days over 5 years to break even. Not quite so bad. We can even take 8½ years and sell 100 copies per year, or 85 copies a year over 10 years. That’s one copy every 3.5 or 4.25 days, respectively.

Now, of course selling solely through our own website rather limits our exposure. We’ll want to get the album in front of as many people as possible. So, let’s put our imaginary album up on CDBaby, which seems to be the most well-respected of the independent music distributors.

As I understand it (please correct me if I’m wrong), CDBaby charges $4 per CD sold, regardless of the gross price, and 25% ($0.29 minimum) for MP3 downloads. They also partner with iTunes and other services for digital distribution; iTunes takes 30%, on top of which CDBaby takes 9%, leaving you roughly $0.63 per $0.99 track. In actual numbers, this all means:

On a $9.99 CD through CDBaby: $5.99.
On a $0.99 track through CDBaby: $0.70.
On a $9.99 album through CDBaby/iTunes: $6.36
On a $0.99 track through CDBaby/iTunes: $0.63.

You’re going to get much wider potential exposure (potential exposure – there are no guarantees, here) for a smaller cut of the profits. That’s the game. And these are reasonable cuts for distribution.

So to go solely through CDBaby and iTunes (you can’t sell directly through iTunes yet at this stage of the game – you still need an intermediary like CDBaby), you’d need to sell 1,333 hard copies of the CD or 1,258 copies of the digital album.

So if we split sales evenly between your site and CDBaby, you have to sell 1,039 copies, or 208 copies per year for 5 years, or one copy every one and a half days over the same period.

Notice I haven’t touched on the number of individual tracks you’d have to sell in order to break even. It’s a lot. But the bulk of your sales are probably going to be albums/discs. Individual tracks will serve to speed you to your goal. And you want to meet your goal sooner rather than later. The further you push back the date where you break even, the longer you’re out the initial investment. And the idea is to spend money to make money, not to spend money period.

If you don’t expect a return on the recording, then it becomes a “vanity project”, which does very little for your career but still manages to make a sizable dent in your pocketbook.

I think I’ve finished with the math portion of this little blessay.

But all of this math and blathering on about investments and costs/returns is my way of speculating about self-produced recordings being the way of the future for concert music.

My scores may be my musical representatives to performers and other composers, but recordings are my ambassadors to the world at large, especially since there are potentially lots of people who may enjoy my music but who aren’t geographically able to make it to concerts of my works. I have most of my works recorded in live performance, but typically the recording quality (and sometimes the performance quality) isn’t up to snuff, and I don’t want garbled, noisy recordings with weird rhythms and wrong notes to be people’s introduction to my music. Consequently, I’m planning a series of recordings over the next few years. It will be time-consuming, and probably fairly expensive, but ultimately worth it, I expect.

I’ll keep you all posted.

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Free Kittens Scores

Friday, February 25, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

Giving away scores. We’ve all done it. You meet a performer, the two of you talk, and they say that they’d love to see a copy of that piece you wrote for their instrument (because it just happens that you have one – quelle coïncidence!). The two of you exchange cards. You rush home – giddy at the prospect of a performance – and mail off a prettily bound copy of the score.

What happens next?

Probably nothing, aside from the performer having a copy of your piece in a pile somewhere in their apartment.

You’ve done this. I’ve done this. We’ve all done this.

I think we should probably stop.

We don’t need to stop entirely, but we do need to take a step back and look at the situation for a moment.

The thing that bothers me about giving away scores for free (ok, there are several things that bother me about it) is that it can devalue the scores and the work that went into creating them. Not to mention the fact that we’ve just spent our own money to print and bind a score – and maybe mail it, too – for someone else who will in all likelihood ignore it. And this is considered to be a perfectly acceptable scenario (the rudeness of the ignoring part aside). It’s not only generally acceptable for a composer to go to the expense of printing, binding, and mailing a score at their own expense so that someone else can have it for free, but it’s expected.

One of the problems is that quite often we’re asked to give someone a copy of the score. It’s not so outright as, “Hey, will you give me a copy of that for free?” But that’s the underlying message. That said: I’m absolutely positive that the intention is never to weasel a free score out of us. (How awful would that be?) It comes from a place of good intentions and even genuine interest, I’m sure, but these things add up, and they can add up quickly. The unintended implication here, though, is that our work isn’t really worth offering to pay for.

Another, bigger problem is that we (young-and/or-emerging-in-particular) composers, in our desperation to be loved and performed everywhere, give away our scores higgledy-piggledy. We meet a performer (who we probably just heard on stage), go all a-twitter at her performerliness, and throw anything at her that we’ve written and that happens to make use of her instrument. Go dignity!

Regardless of whether we are asked for a score or offer it, there’s an element of “insult to injury” to the scenario – in the latter scenario, we just happen to be insulting ourselves. The injury is that we’ve spent our own money to print, etc the score. The insult is manifold. First, someone (the composer and/or the score-requester) thinks it’s ok for the composer to spend their own money to print, blah blah blah. Second, beyond the score itself, there’s the whole element of the composer having spent years and years and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars studying and preparing to be able to spend the days/weeks/months writing the music and engraving the score that was given away for free. I, for one, didn’t spend all that time and tuition on my degrees or all that money and time on private study so that I could spend more money to just give away the fruits of my labor and education.

In the case of composers throwing scores at anyone they come into contact with, I’d like to see us be a little more dignified. There’s nothing wrong with wanting this new, exciting person to perform our works, but maybe we can create a more significant bond with them that will make it a bit more likely that they would perform our works in public.

In the case of being asked for scores, I do see less and less of this going on, which I like. In my own experience, I’ve had a growing number of people offer to purchase copies of my scores rather than ask for them outright. I think the difference is that, while yes the culture may be changing, these people also know that my scores are available on my website and on the NewMusicShelf (yay!), and that they’re affordable.

So, some potential solutions as I see them.

Solution 1: Stop treating scores like noodles and performers like walls, throwing one at the other and hoping they’ll stick. Instead, create relationships with performers, which will hopefully make them genuinely interested in your music and in performing it regularly. Then you can give them all the scores you want for free – it’s much more meaningful, and will probably be infinitely more fruitful.

Solution 2: If a performer says, “Yeah, I’d like to check out your piece for kazoo and nose flute,” direct them to your website where they can hear audio of the piece, and buy a copy of the score if they’re so inclined. This, of course, necessitates that you a) have a website (if you don’t: shame, shame, shame! Do it now!), b) have MP3s of your works, and c) have a set-up on your site or somewhere else to sell your scores (admittedly harder to do without a certain level of Web Skillz or someone to do it for you).

Solution 3: If a performer wants to check out your work, and you want to give it to them for free – email it. Save yourself the printing and postage costs. Not to mention the tree.

We’ve all gone through a lot of expensive preparation for our chosen careers, be we composer or performer, and we’re all in this strange, maybe-sinking ship (if you listen to any number of critics, which I don’t) of concert music together. While I’m not advocating a stance of “pay me or you get nothing”, I am a big advocate of working together in a way that’s fair to everyone, and not treating your work as something without value beyond the purely artistic.

Now, I do like giving away scores, I’ll be the first to admit, but I try to be judicious in who I give them to. Someone just performed one of my works? They get a signed copy of the score in thanks, and maybe second one – something I’d like to hear them do next. A close friend’s birthday? I write them a song and present them with a copy. I set a poet’s words? Signed copy, absolutely. Someone is a big advocate of new music in general, and my works in particular? You better bet that they get scores from me! But performers I just met? Not likely. I’m more interested in having it mean something when I give away a score.

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Pricing: The Goldilocks Zone

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

When I’ve talked to other composers about self-publishing and selling their own works, one of the most consistent stumbling blocks is the issue of pricing. It can be very difficult to evaluate whether a given price is too high or too low.

The worry is that if a score is priced too high, no one will want to shell out the money because it’s too expensive, and consequently won’t buy it; but if it’s priced too low, people may think it must not be any good, and they still won’t buy it. Also, pricing a score on the lower end of the spectrum gives a smaller return to the composer, which may be undesirable because of all of the time and effort that went into composing the piece and engraving the score; but pricing on the higher end of the spectrum, while maybe “fairer” to the composer considering his efforts, may still turn people off, thus depriving him of any income at all.

It’s a difficult situation.

An element that adds to the confusion is what we might consider to be the pricing “standards” set by currently available scores that are published by the big music publishing houses. Let’s take for example two song cycles of roughly equal duration, difficulty, and quality. A major publisher will charge upwards of $20 where I would probably ask for $7. The major difference is that they have to charge that much because they have a much higher per-score production cost than I do – they have editors, engravers, marketing, art, and legal departments to pay; not to mention the costs of printing and materials. And while more publishers are doing print-on-demand, it’s much less efficient and cost-effective than printing a larger run of scores. So, like any business, they’re going to pass the added expense onto the consumer. Again, they have to charge more to stay in business.

I think that we shouldn’t be pricing our scores in a similar range as those that are traditionally published. I think, instead, that we should be competing – and you don’t compete by charging the same as your competitor. By which I don’t mean that we should adopt the Always-The-Lowest-Price, cut-throat, Wal-mart-style approach to slashing prices maniacally and attempting to drive out all other business. I mean instead that we aren’t burdened by anywhere near the overhead costs as traditional publishers, so we have the luxury of pricing accordingly. Plus, even when pricing my song cycle at $7, I can expect a much higher return than had it been sold at $20 by a traditional publisher (especially if I’m selling digital copies, where there are no printing or other overhead costs).

Personally, although I like buying new scores, I find most traditionally published scores to be prohibitively expensive. I just can’t afford them. Consequently, I take myself as a model customer. If I were looking for new material to perform, or at least to consider performing, what price range would I find most comfortable and inviting? Is that price range fair to the composer given the length and instrumentation of the piece?

Unlike the world of novels, where standardized pricing is the norm and sales expectations are much higher, we have a much tougher row to hoe, I think. One current argument in the book world is for ebooks to be priced at $2.99. Another argument is for a tiered method. We don’t have the luxury of such clear delineation of categories as is required by the tiered pricing method – we have to balance duration, instrumentation, and (potentially) difficulty in our pricing decisions. We also have the question of whether or not to sell parts bundled with a score or separately, and how to price those.

I like the sentiment behind the current arguments for ebook pricing: encourage sales and foster long-term growth through affordability. Simple, really. We certainly can’t expect the sheer number of sales that a successful novel can generate, but we can definitely encourage more performers to take a chance on our music by making it affordable. Affordable without underselling yourself.

I think it’s a much easier task when you stop trying to assign Monetary Worth to your works, and start thinking in terms of affordability, fairness, and long-term growth.

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We Don’t Need No (Business) Education

Monday, February 21, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

So I’ve already written about the problems of pricing and why we should (mostly) stop giving away scores for free, but these two topics are part of a larger issue – the lack of education we receive on the business aspects of the concert music business.

I had a great undergraduate education. I was encouraged to push myself academically, personally, and artistically, and I got way more experience than I had dreamed possible – 17 commissions and over 120 performances of my works during those four years. But I was never formally taught about commissions or contracts or royalties. I was very lucky when I left school to have had a private teacher who was well-acquainted with such matters, and who made it a point to educate me on the business side of things. I was taught how to register my works with ASCAP and maintain my performance records; I was given advice on how to negotiate text setting permissions / royalty agreements with poets; I was shown how to present my works professionally; and I was even taught what expenses I could claim as a composer on my taxes and how to organize them to be prepared for an audit. I’ve also “inherited” two separate filing systems to keep my works and my correspondence organized (I use a hybrid of the two, which I’ve in turn passed along to two people who have hired me to organize their archives). But most young composers I know haven’t gotten that sort of education.

Fortunately, more and more schools are offering courses that tackle business matters, but the culture is still very much anti-business. We would much rather focus our energies on our Art and leave the dirty stuff – the money matters – to others. Or we’ll deal with the money when it starts coming in. Except that it won’t come in if we don’t make it come in. We can’t be ostriches with our heads in the sand if we want to survive as both individuals and a community.

Now, we don’t need to get a whole new degree in all things financial, but we should know some basics, because there are some real consequences if we don’t. Indulge me for a moment and let me continue to draw parallels between the field of concert music and the field of prose writing. There was a recent incident involving Columbia University’s MFA writing program, a very famous, very unscrupulous writer, and a lot of screwed-over young people. These young people were offered very unrealistic returns on a very unrealistic amount of work if they signed a very slippery contract written up by said unscrupulous writer’s unscrupulous lawyers. Some sort of education in how to deal with contracts (consult a lawyer before you sign anything!?) would have served these students incredibly well. You can read a great account of the events, as well as a well-written dissection of the underlying issues here.

Composers need a basic knowledge of contracts and their rights just as much as aspiring novelists. Although I obviously advocate self-publication, I know it’s not for everyone, so composers should be aware of what’s in their contracts with traditional publishers. And film composers are especially exposed to being screwed over, however inadvertently.

Let me offer an example of how contracts with a traditional publisher can cause problems. A friend of mine had a chamber piece published about 30 years ago by one of the major publishers. Standard contract. The contract, however, didn’t stipulate that the piece be engraved or that parts be created. So, whenever anyone wants to buy a copy of the score, they can’t. They have to buy three copies. Of a xeroxed manuscript. Because no one engraved it or made parts. And it costs $110. Who would ever buy that? And because of his contract, he can’t get the rights back to do it properly and sell it himself under his own publishing imprint.

I should hope that that story alone would send every composer on the planet scrambling for a book on the subject of contracts, or a crash course from a lawyer friend. It probably won’t, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

Unfortunately, the most common attitudes I see are either of haughty disdain for any activity that might sully the arts with the stink of financial gain, or a general wide-eyed naïveté when it comes to anything remotely financial. And I can’t figure out which one bugs me more.

Let me eviscerate the former first, though. Ignorance, I understand. That “I smell poo” nose-wrinkling, I loathe. Loathe. Loathe. Loathe.

One of my favorite examples is recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Jennifer Higdon. I heard a story recently from a friend who has attended some rather distinguished music schools. A remarkable number of composition students during his time in school had nothing but snarky things to say about Ms. Higdon because she has… a publicist! How dare she! How dare she hire a professional to bring her performances and commissions, the central goal of composerdom! How dare she attempt to support herself through the career that she has chosen for herself! How dare she!

I really only have contempt for that sort of behavior, and I don’t event try to mask it. I think it’s undignified, and I think it’s petty. It’s a purely negative behavior that benefits no one, and only serves to hold up success to derision. It’s also potentially very damaging to the derider, should his badmouthing reach the ears of someone in a position of power who happens to feel warmly toward her maligned colleague. The world of concert music is a small one; the world of composers even more so.

In the case of the monetarily naive and uneducated, it seems as though the general attitude is that they don’t expect to make much money from their works, and they’re fine with that; but if something eventually happens to come along, surely someone will take care of them. That’s an awfully laissez-faire attitude, don’t you think? “I’m going to write what I write, stick it on a shelf in my apartment, hope somebody performs it (but I won’t go after the royalties if they do), and not try to

But it’s not uncommon. There’s a real squeamishness and embarrassment about monetary gain from art music – very much related to the active sneering at financially successful composers – but turned inward, as if to say, “Who am I to think that my works have some sort of value beyond the purely artistic?” (“I don’t even like to admit that they have artistic value – I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I don’t have the proper humility in the face of my Art.”)

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Publishing renaissance

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot (a LOT) of reading about publishing and self-publishing, and it’s been particularly enlightening.

Pretty much all of my reading has been about publishing books. I haven’t bothered reading about music publishing for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of writings on the subject.

There is, however, a TON of writing available about self-publishing books. There’s a renaissance going on amongst our prose and poetry writing brethren that I find incredibly intriguing – more and more authors are “going indie” and publishing their own works. Some are established authors branching out into different genres and trying something outside of the Brand that they and their publishers have created for them; some are established authors who want to take control of their works and their profits; some are non-established authors who found no interest in their work from the big publishers; and some have never had any experience with major publishers at all. This shift that’s happening is really exciting to read about because everything is changing so rapidly for the industry, and people keep finding new and ingenious ways to get their work out there. What’s also interesting to read about is the vitriol being spewed at some of these authors by people in their own industry. Not heartening, surely, but interesting.

I’m really inspired by the writers who are doing so well at self-publishing, self-marketing, self-distributing, self-etc. – there are a lot of them, and many more are joining those ranks. I find it inspiring in large part because I know the phenomenon can be translated to the concert music world. We’ve actually already started on the path toward our own publishing renaissance, but I think we’ve stalled. Not out of any inherent laziness – although I think that we as composers have been trained to avoid self-promotion and any act that may make us seem as though we actually want to make a living at this career for which we’ve spent so much time and money educating and preparing ourselves (a conversation for another day). Our stalling has been due mostly, I think, to a lack of outlets for self-publishing composers to showcase their works. [Insert preaching-to-the-choir-style plug for NewMusicShelf here.]

I want to point out two blogs that I’ve found particularly interesting and motivational: author Joe Konrath’s blog and Zoe Winters’ posts over at IndieReader.com. They have a lot to say about their industry that I feel is pertinent to the discussion of self-publishing in music.

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Getting over the hump

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Thanks to the economy tanking in September 2008, everyone seems to have had a difficult time making ends meet. I certainly know that I have. Being a composer is not a particularly lucrative vocation, being a young composer especially so. As a result, since moving to New York City in September 2004, I’ve made my living as a temp.

I give up roughly 40 hours of my week hopping from office to office in Manhattan. I’ll spend days, weeks, or even months in an office, performing mostly menial tasks – filing, data entry, and rarely (very rarely) a bit of reception work (which I invariably loathe). I was very fortunate prior to the economic crash – I had found a great long-term temp gig in the Alternative Fund Services department of HSBC. The VP who oversaw the area that I assisted was also a musician, so he understood my situation and did his best to keep me on for as long as possible. Ultimately, I was there for three and a half years, not including a several-month stint where I temped for a jewelry company. In the middle of this 3.5 years, I spent about six months as a full-time, salaried employee of HSBC – I was a Fund of Funds Administrator (basically, I was an administrator for a particular type of hedge fund) – but it was too great of a draw on my time, so I quit, left on very good terms, and was called back again as a temp when I finished with the jewelry company. I stayed until about two weeks before the crash, when every single temp in the company was let go at once.

After that, the economy was so terrible that my temp agencies had a very difficult time finding me work. From September 2008 until August 2010, I worked a total of maybe 10 weeks – not because I didn’t want to, but because the work just wasn’t there. I was fortunate in that I could draw Unemployment for a year, and I was able to design a website or two, but none of this was enough to pay the rent, let alone bills. After my Unemployment ran out, I was in pretty dire straits. Consequently, I got myself into a bit of a financial pickle, and was fortunately bailed out by my parents earlier this year. (Hooray for parents!)

The constant financial worry was obviously a major draw on my mental abilities. The anxiety and subsequent depression made it pretty much impossible to write. I even had a rough go of it during my stays at artist colonies – I couldn’t maintain my concentration, and kept feeling as though maybe I shouldn’t be there at all, if only because I couldn’t afford to travel or be away from potential jobs. And while I was in the City, I spent almost zero time writing – I would sleep embarrassingly late and then fritter away the remainder of the day. Not an existence indicative of a healthy mind.

I managed to write only a handful of works during that period, most of which had pretty strict deadlines, and it was still like pulling teeth to get me to sit down to write, even with the promise of money.

For quite a while I thought that the problem was that I didn’t have a draw on my time – that I needed to have less of my time available to me so that I would value what little time I had to write and use it properly. Now there may be some validity to this, but it never once crossed my mind until a few weeks ago that my problem was that I couldn’t think except to worry about the five dollars in my checking account and thirteen cents in savings. The worry would keep me up at night. I was afraid to buy anything. I was terrified every time I swiped my debit card, expecting that the tiniest purchase would be denied because I might not have enough money in my account.

Some of the haze finally cleared a few weeks ago on the plane en route to Santa Fe, NM to see my friends Danny and Kaity get married and hear the premiere of The Gallant Weaver, which I arranged for solo guitar as their processional. In August, my boyfriend’s sister recommended me for a freelance temp job in the Finance office at New York City Center, where she had worked in Development. That assignment lasted “officially” from mid-August to October 1. I say “officially” and put it in quotes for two reasons: 1. I’ve been asked back for a while to help out in the Capital Projects office, and 2. I’ve been offered (and I’ve accepted) a full-time position in Finance starting December 13. I’ll be taking over for a really great guy who’s been at City Center for quite a while, and is retiring at the end of the year. Big shoes to fill!

It was around the time that my boss-to-be began making job-style overtures in my direction that I started to realize that my compositional problem hasn’t been too much time on my hands – it’s been incessant, gut-wrenching, debilitating anxiety/depression over the fact that I’ve had no money for the past two years! So once there was a light at the end of the tunnel, an oasis on the horizon, I was finally able to think more clearly and realize that my creative process had been hijacked by paralyzing anxiety and a real, deep depression.

Now it feels as though a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I still have to live a little frugally until the job starts in mid-December, but I’ve been able to breathe and sleep easier.

And the music has begun to flow again! In a matter of days, I wrote a 4-minute choral work that I’m really excited to hear when it’s premiered at Illinois State University the weekend before I start full-time at City Center. I feel energized to write and write and write!

I intend to attack the Songbook Project again, and I’ve got an interesting series of short chamber works bubbling away in my brain. Also, I’ve found a direction for the orchestral piece I started at Ucross last year that I think is going to propel it into something quite good – important, even. So let’s get to work!

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