It’s no great secret or surprise I’m sure that the biggest challenge we have faced with this venture is the clearance process for copyrighted material. We are extremely proud of our arrangements created from songs in the public domain, but we know that the arrangements which really get hearts racing are those adapted from popular favourites of recent (and not so recent) years.

We have had some success in getting rights-owned songs approved for publication. As of this post, we have 33 cleared titles available on the website. The problem is that it has taken a great deal of effort, time and cost just to get these 33 titles approved.

I am very excited to announce therefore that this is all about to change!

The biggest publisher of choral music in the world by far is Hal Leonard. In fact, if you were to name favourite song you wanted to sing with your choir, there’s roughly a 90% probability that the rights are either owned or managed by Hal Leonard. Up to now we’ve not been able to interest them in dealing with us, but after many months of effort we have just signed a contract with gives us access to their entire library of music which we will be able to offer choral arrangements of on a worldwide basis!

The key element in this change of circumstances is a new global Digital Asset Management (DAM) system which Hal Leonard has developed to automate much of the process of distributing copies and managing the royalties of copyrighted music. We are going to be one of the first websites in the UK to integrate with this system so this really marks a significant milestone for ChoirCommunity!

We are working extremely hard to get the first batch of new arrangements cleared and ready to go while we complete the technical integration work on the website.

In the meantime, we do need to make you aware of one very important change!

As part of the deal, Hal Leonard looked at the pricing of our arrangements and concluded that they couldn’t make any agreement work commercially unless the unit price of each copy was significantly increased. I have to admit, we had pretty much come to this conclusion ourselves as we have had to carry the cost of producing and clearing all the rights-owned songs so far.

As a result, we have contractually agreed to set the minimum price of copyrighted arrangements when this deal comes into place at £1.50 per copy for sheet music and 60p for associated learning tracks. I’m very aware that this is a steep increase from the current price of 50p and 20p respectively, but it does reflect commercial reality and is still significantly less than you would be able to get these arrangements elsewhere (including Hal Leonard’s own websites).

We put the quality of our music at the very top of our priorities at ChoirCommunity. All our arrangements have been carefully crafted to deliver the best singing experience as well as the best sound and so we believe that our arrangements still represent extremely good value for money.

However, one of the reasons for this post is to give our loyal customers the chance to obtain these fantastic arrangements at the current price before they change. We don’t know exactly when that will be at this stage, but it will be soon!

The titles which will be increasing in price are:

Ain’t No Sunshine, Bill Withers – Arr. Gitika Partington
Anything Goes, Cole Porter – Arr. Richard Salt
Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon & Garfunkel – Arr. Craig McLeish
Cheek to Cheek, Irving Berlin, Arr. Craig McLeish
Copacabana, Barry Manilow – Arr. Richard Salt
Creep, Radiohead – Arr. Richard Salt
Dreamer, Supertramp – Arr. Richard Salt
Electricity, Elton John – Arr. Craig McLeish
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, Paul Simon – Arr. Gitika Partington
God Only Knows, Beach Boys – Arr. Craig McLeish
Homeless, Paul Simon – Arr. Craig McLeish
I Don’t like Mondays, Boomtown Rats – Arr. Richard Salt
I Get A Kick Out Of You, Cole Porter – Arr. Richard Salt
I Love Rock ‘n Roll, The Arrows – Arr. Alison Crutchley
I Only Wanna Be With You, Dusty Springfield – Arr. Craig McLeish
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, U2 – Arr. Richard Salt
I Walk The Line, Johnny Cash – Arr. Gitika Partington
Jolene, Dolly Parton – Arr. Gitika Partington
Kiss Me, Sixpence None The Richer – Arr. Richard Salt
Lean On Me, Bill Withers – Arr. Craig McLeish
Longest Time, Billy Joel – Arr. Craig McLeish
Love Is The Drug, Roxy Music – Arr. Gitika Partington
Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division – Arr. Gitika Partington
Manic Monday, The Bangles/Prince – Arr. Gitika Partington
Perfect, Fairground Attraction – Arr. Craig McLeish
Red Red Wine, UB40 – Arr, Richard Salt
S.O.S, Abba – Arr. Gitika Partington
Say What You Want, Texas – Arr. Richard Salt
Scarborough Fair, Simon & Garfunkel – Arr. Craig McLeish
Sway, Dean Martin – Arr. Craig Mcleish
Video Killed The Radio Star, The Buggles – Arr. Gitika Partington
Viva La Vida, Coldplay – Arr. Gitika Partington

Just click on any of these titles to go to the relevant product page and purchase the copies you need!

Something I want to make clear is that we will continue to produce more titles based on material in the public domain and these arrangements will remain at the same price, along with all the other fantastic traditional, folk and world music titles we have in our library today.

We’d be very interested to hear from you about this or any other matter so please get in touch in the comments here or by email at [email protected].