Category Archives: NewMusicShelf

Fanfare for the Little Green Man

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Every so often, you run across an old piece that you’ve forgotten about, and that you really shouldn’t have. That happened today while I was home sick from the day job. I was clicking around on my desktop, and there, nestled in my folder marked “Chamber Works” was a long-forgotten (about two years) set of pieces that were supposed to be a slightly larger work. For several reasons, the full piece never came to fruition, although I’d still like it to. Since there are more pressing projects on my plate, it will have to stay on the back-burner for a while. In the meantime, I’m releasing the existing movements separately.

I spent about an hour cleaning up the second of the two movements, and am offering it up by itself: Fanfare for the Little Green Man for violin duo.

Here’s how my computer says it sounds:

And, of course, it’s available at the NewMusicShelf!

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Like this

Monday, September 5, 2011

I’ve been working to add more social networking integration to the site. You’ve undoubtedly noticed the row of buttons on each blog post – Tweet This, Facebook Like, Google +1, Facebook Share. Click away – especially if you like something you’ve read here! If you like it, certainly someone else will, and you, lovely reader, are my best hope at being discovered by the masses! So by all means, Like, Tweet, Share, +1!

I’ve also added to each Works page a Facebook Like and Send button. This way, if there’s a particular work you like, you can let your Facebook friends know about it. More social networking integration will be coming this week.

Similarly, I’ve added the same buttons to the NewMusicShelf, so be sure to head over there and let the world know that you like this or that work of mine! If you have something you’d like to say about any of the works, you can also comment/write a review of any work on the NMS.

Also, be prepared for a new announcement, and a BUNCH of backdated blog posts in the coming week. (I’ve created a new Category for them, so you can read everything in one fell swoop!)

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend! I’ve spent mine at the beach in Montauk reading David Cutler’s The Savvy Musician, and eating FAR too much.

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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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#Armada

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Yesterday I joined a little online “collective” of composers who are writing an exquisite corpse via Twitter. So far, I’ve contributed one measure (the second), and am sure to write a few more before the 140 measures are complete. You can check out the website for #Armada (Hashtag Armada) here: http://hashtagarmada.wordpress.com/.

The resulting piece will most likely end up on the NewMusicShelf, so stay tuned.

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Happy Birthday to Me!

Monday, April 18, 2011

Today is my 29th birthday, and to celebrate music-business-ly, I’m offering discounts on my scores throughout the week on NewMusicShelf. For today and tomorrow, all of my song cycles have been reduced to $2 apiece. Check it out:http://bit.ly/ettJ1r

Print scores sold through this site this week will also come with a special surprise!

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“The Gallant Weaver” for Choir

Monday, April 11, 2011

This evening I started a new arrangement of “The Gallant Weaver” for SATB choir and piano. The reason? There’s a choral composition competition (say that ten times fast) that I’d like to enter, and the deadline is Friday. I’ve been hemming and hawing over texts for ages, and this afternoon after a very busy day at the day job where I didn’t choose a text like I’d half-planned to do (“Look it up while you’re at work, instead of doing your work! Brought to you by the Internet Foundation.”), I decided to make life a little easier on myself and just arrange something from my existing catalog. “The Gallant Weaver” is ripe for the picking in this respect, and also happens to be one of my favorites of my own songs (don’t tell the others, though – we don’t want them getting jealous…).

So after a little walk in this beautiful warm weather, I dove into the arrangement and am already at the halfway mark. I should be able to finish the arrangement Wednesday evening, which makes me incredibly happy. It’s nice to add a new piece to my catalog, and to do it so quickly!

I’d have it done tomorrow, except that I’m meeting with Jeff Algera to make the final arrangements for the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series, which is effectively finished. However, part of our meeting is to deal with the funds leftover from our semi-season last year so that I can start a new series in the coming months very much like the T-A Concerts. The reason for the dissolution of the Series is that Jeff and his wife are moving to California next month, which will make continuing the Concerts in their current form very difficult. Obviously, Copland and Sessions managed to do it via post in the early ’30s while the latter lived in Paris, and it’s infinitely easier to communicate via Skype, but it’s time to change things up a bit, and Jeff’s life will certainly be taken up for quite a while with setting up his new life and web business on the West Coast.

I don’t normally write pieces specifically for competitions. In fact, I usually avoid those that require an unperformed, unpublished piece because I have so few of those. And as a self-published composer, I honestly can’t say that I have any unpublished pieces. As soon as I finish something, I slap the Tobenski Music Press logo on it, and throw it on my site and the NewMusicShelf. Everything I write is immediately considered to be published. But it’s not published by a “legacy publisher” (a nice term I came across to describe traditional publishers), which is certainly what is meant by the “no publication” rule. No danger of that ever happening – I don’t want a “legacy publisher”! (More on that some other time.) My other point of “meh”-ness is that the piece can’t be performed in the meantime, or submitted anywhere else. So, until August when the award winners are announced, this arrangement, which I’m so far very happy with, has to sit on my hard drive and twiddle its thumbs. But I guarantee that even though I can’t do anything with it in the meantime, it will be ready to go for the instant that the announcements are made. Of course, I’m certainly hoping that it has to sit on the shelf for another few months because it’s won the award and needs to be premiered by this organization!

Fingers crossed!

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Free stuff!

Monday, March 21, 2011

For a limited time, I’m offering three scores for free at the NewMusicShelf:

It’s all I have to bring, for voice and piano
To a Western Boy, for voice and piano
and
Letter from a Young Poet, for cello and piano

Grab ‘em while you can!

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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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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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