Introduction

Thank you for visiting our site!  I hope you find the information and materials contained here interesting, useful and of the highest quality.  We have tried to make this website a little bit different to the norm so please let us know what you think.

This page is designed to explain a little bit more about how we have set up the licensing and purchasing process for the music we are offering.  As explained on the ‘About’ page, one of the missions of ChoirCommunity is to provide high quality arrangements of popular songs, fully licenced and affordable.  In order to do so, we have introduced a few simple requirements which we hope all our customers will understand and embrace.

The Music Licensing Process

All arrangements of third-party owned songs offered through the site have been specifically approved through the relevant publishers.  The process to achieve this is still quite involved and costly and we are undertaking to pay all rights owners any royalties owed to them from each sale we make.  

All music is licenced on a ‘per copy’ basis (a copy being required for each ‘user’ of the music) so choirs are expected to buy the number of ‘copies’ which they are going to use.  In order to encourage this, we require you to tell us the size of your choir when you register on the site.  This will set the minimum number of licences you can buy of each title (sheet music or learning track).  We have set this in general to be 50% of the bottom of the range you have selected (so a 40-60 strong choir will be required to purchase a minimum of 20 copies at any one time).  Please be honest about the number of copies you are going to use.  The absolute minimum we have set for most titles is 10 (to cater for small a cappella groups only).

In the case of the sheet music PDF files, these will be watermarked with the purchase information when you download the file.  This will contain the purchaser’s email, number of copies bought, date of purchase and order number.  This has been done to discourage illegal copying of the material.  We recognise that this is not a completely fool-proof system, but believe that a simple reminder is all most people need to do the right thing!

For the audio learning tracks, each licence you buy includes the audio tracks for all the available voice parts. This means that you don’t have to worry about figuring out how many of each voice part you need, but you still need to buy a licence for every member of your choir that is going to use one of the tracks – one licence can’t be used for more than one person, even if they are different voice parts

We have thought long and hard about the pricing of the music in the context of how it is sold and consumed currently.  Based on how long a piece of music is practiced and worked with on average, we estimate that each title should require somewhere between 5 and 15 pence a week from each choir member to cover it.  We hope you agree that feels like a reasonable price for music arranged properly and specifically for choirs like yours.

UK vs. International Publishing Rights

Unfortunately, the music licensing process is not only involved in its own right, but is also split into different geographical markets, each of which have different rights owners.   For this reason, the sale of some rights-owned titles are restricted to limited territories.  The website has automatic geo-location tracking to manage this and will let you know if a title is not available in the country you are logging in from.  We have also tried to make these restrictions clear in our catalogue.  The good news is that thanks to our deal with Hal Leonard, the vast majority of titles are available on a worldwide basis, as are all our public-domain titles.