Where Do Song Buyers Look On The Web (For Lead Sheets)?

[MikeRobinson]

Where in the Web are sites where music buyers go to find copyrighted music, offered for sale by their owners e.g. in lead-sheet form, ready for consideration for purchase?

I mean... they don't actually find 'em on Broadway at Fifth (in Nashville, of course...) playing on the street corners.

Where do you place your product?

[thepopeofpop]

As far as I know they go to publishing companies.

There isn't any recognised marketplace on the web where unpublished writers can sell their stuff.

Of course, you might want to check this thread:

http://forums.songstuff.com/topic/14997-diy-music-copyright/

Edited June 1, 2010 by thepopeofpop

[Lazz]

Where in the Web are sites where music buyers go to find copyrighted music, offered for sale by their owners e.g. in lead-sheet form...?

Depends whose stuff you're interested in.

Artists individually and regularly make lead-sheets available for download direct from their own web-sites.

I just snaffled a couple from John Scofield and from Antonio Carlos Jobim that way.

Then there are on-line retailers like http://www.musicdispatch.com/ or, as his holiness intimated above, publisher sites like http://www.halleonard.com/?pro=608, where you can check out their stock somewhat and they will mail stuff out

I think googlage should kick back a lot of similar likelihoods.

Where do you place your product?

Being myself at some distance from the technological cutting edge - all I possess is a Facebook page where people can at least listen to what we've got.

Then, if anyone wants a lead-sheet, all they need to do is ask, and we send them a PDF.

They don't actually buy it - but we actively seek interest from a small field of people who are likely to be recording and performing, so mechanicals and performance royalties are what we're after.

Eventually I'll get back round to having a dedicated site again to help with the job.

.

[MikeRobinson]

That is quite interesting. I had presumed that I merely was not looking in the right place. My "googleage" (love the term...), which of course I had already done (some of), didn't turn up anything in particular, and I assumed that I just had not yet stumbled on it yet. (Yes, I tried "stumbleupon.com" too.)

Now, I grant you, a true professional marketplace would be well-hid, lest it be pummeled by hacks bearing "three chords and the truth," but I think that sheet music would have a little different market because no one is attempting to sit there and play it for you.

I know that there's quite a bit of Facebook activity, and that "everybody's got his web site," but it's not difficult to see that "web sites" have become "islands in the stream," not "the stream itself," the latter being what you want when you've got something to sell.

So if "you found a trunkful of songs in your grandma's attic," well ...

• You know where to talk about your finding (and about grandma, may she rest in peace) = Facebook.
• You know where to sell the trunk itself = eBay.
• But, having duly copyrighted them, where do you sell the songs?

If there truly isn't one, then I want some venture capital ...

Edited June 6, 2010 by MikeRobinson

[john]

hey

There are sites that will broker your song on some level or another and most of those provide a publisher/label/production house log in. Sites like http://www.taxi.com do reportedly promote your tracks to labels and I am sure they have a portal for these companies.

There are also sites for distributing tracks to press, library portals etc.

The fact is that a lot have tried to do exactly what you are talking about that there isn't an out front leader of the field. I know several that went out of business, like songbrokers.com who actively pitch your songs and hold songs in a variety of formats from lead sheets to demos.. http://www.paramountsong.com does what you descirbe but only for nashville, and they are but one company of several.

In truth the industry go to the publishers themselves. Publishers after all are the traditional hubs of the lead sheet universe. As to is there a hole to be filled for indie musicians, sure... that's what ever publisher out there is doing, just on a more limited scale.

These are high specialized B2B (business to business) sites. Sites like http://www.tracklicensing.com perform a similar function but from a licensing rather than lead sheet perspective.

The one issue you would have, and it's a big one... if you created a site to sell sheet music, there are loads, but lacking indie artists. The many many indie artists music sites would need add on ony a pdf upload and download plus a payment gateway (in fact we could add it to songstuff fairly easily... the point is you could spend lots developing and promoting this and get nowhere because on the end customer facing sheet music sales side there is lots of established competitors, on the music business facing side there are many many publishers, and on the individual artist versus the music biz there are song pluggers, although most song pluggers work with demos not sheet music.

It's not an idea without merits but it is likely you could set up your business only for some existing company bolting that on and beating you to it. the other factor here is that production companies go to known publishers. If they are looking for a song that's where A&R men come in, scouting out music from unknowns etc. Far more common for them is to go see bands, listen to requested demos, deal with unrequested demos (trash can usually) or even browsing myspace and other music sites that have charts so they can see what people already like... and if they like it they might ask for sheet music. After all far less people read music than can listen to it.

For those reasons I think you would need do develop the idea more. You would need to develop thee go to site for indie musicians when dealing with the music industry, and more importantly thee go to site for the music industry when scouting indie bands... that means having audio demos, possibly charts, with lead sheets a nice add on. For that reason you would need a site that faced consumers, artists and labels.

Alternatively you might want to create a site that publishers would also list their songs on, so it was thee go to site for the rest of the industry. Yet again publishers would be comparing a lead sheet site versus their own in-house site which provides demos etc plus the lead sheet... so yet again we are back at adding audio. To get the publishers on board there needs to be a good reason for them to do so.

I'm not saying your suggestion wont work, far from it, just that there is a an education process involved, and established industry to fight against and major competition just about everywhere you look.

Cheers

john

[MikeRobinson]

I actually meant the "venture capital" comment somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

There are so many changes occurring throughout the creative arts industries, that I know that the "buying and selling of product" side of it is changing too. Thanks for the pointers.

(Yeah, sometimes it does help to actually live in Nashville.)

Edited June 10, 2010 by MikeRobinson