Thanks to all of you – our early supporters, we’ve made a great start at ChoirCommunity.  

In some ways it doesn’t feel like we’ve been live for just one month, but since January is now behind us we thought we would share a few of our (very) early milestones and achievements.

Despite our decision to go with a ‘soft’ launch on 1st January comprising a reduced selection of arrangements, there was clearly plenty of interest from the start with the first sales happening within hours of ‘Go Live’.  Since then, nearly 3000 copies of music have been purchased through January.

There was quite a bit of ‘jostling’ during the month for the most downloaded title, but Gitika’s arrangement  of Video Killed the Radio Star finished strongly with 400 copies sold in the end to take the top spot.  Perhaps the quote we managed to get from Geoff Downes himself made the difference (you can read it along with some other testimonials we have received if you scroll down on the home page).

Gitika also managed to win our friendly internal competition for the first sale on the site, which was for her arrangement of the traditional African song Iqude.   The top prize of a bottle of extra virgin olive oil will be presented to Gitika at our next meeting!

Craig and Richard have nothing to worry about however as sales of I Don’t Like Mondays, Homeless, Copacabana, Longest Time and God Only Knows also seem to be very popular, amongst others.

We also had 93 choirs register on the site in January, of which 74 were community choirs.  School and workplace choirs came next with 7 each.  This is all before we’ve really started promoting the site very hard also, so is a very encouraging sign.

To that end, I would like to announce our next promotional theme for the month.  

In January it was our launch offer. For February, we are going to launch a ‘Refer a Friend’ scheme with some big discounts on the music available for both ‘referrers’ and ‘referrees’ (if that’s a word).  

Details of how this initiative is going to work will be sent out very soon.

Photograph by Karen Kodish Photography