Yes... but only somewhat simple. I am currently exploring exactly this possibility.Vincent Cordel wrote:Is there a simple way one could post one's own sheet music (one's own compositions) in a sort of "online store" and collect payments from people online?
David H. Baily wrote:
From what I understand PayPal charges 80-centsUS for each transaction, so you simply increase your cost by that much.This is good advice from David. My computer guru son is writing code so that I can sell pdfs online with a code for downloading which changes after a few days, so that endless downloads (should I be so lucky as to be that much in demand!) are not possible. He's even tinkering with the idea of limiting the number of downloads in some way, so that the code self-destructs after a certain number have been retrieved. But I'm not worried about that because it's easy to screw up a download and have to start over. I don't want people on the other end frustrated (though the few pdfs I have already supplied to conductors in other countries, where shipping actual parts and scores is expensive, have worked just fine.) I can't do anything about extra downloads, any more than I can stop people from Xeroxing. So be it.
The PDF with the code doesn't require any royalty, you simply have to purchase the full-scale Adobe Acrobat. That is a tax-deductible business expense and if you do much business on-line with code-protected pdf files you will quickly amortize the expense.
The main reason I want to do this is not so I can make a lot of money. I make my living from other musical projects that are more commercially or educationally oriented. The record producing, coaching, arranging, scoring, writing-for-kids-or-films-or-textbooks-or-commercials work I do pays the rent and subsidizes the 50-cents-an-hour-or-less art music composing I do. I get just enough requests rental or purchase of scores and parts and vocal scores, that I've grown tired of the not very lucrative and boring tasks of shipping and handling. Not only that, with rentals I often get sets of parts back covered with pencil marks (occasionally even PEN), coffee stains, and torn pages, in spite of the contract stipulation that rental parts are to come back cleaned up. I think it's great to have players mark up their parts, but I'd rather have them do it on parts they own. I've worn out a dozen erasers just on the parts for my setting of "America the Beautiful" which has gone out and come back about forty times this past year. I'm ready to abandon doing my own rentals, and I'm ready to go electronic.
It's less time consuming, easier, and cheaper for me to supply pdfs on line than to take the time to collate, package, and send scores and parts, and is also less subject to MY mistakes, leaving out a fourth horn part or somesuch. Once a piece is pdf'd and posted, I can be pretty much done with it. I'd actually rather print, bind, and send big scores myself, and I'll continue to do that most of the time. But I've even had a few conductors ask for the scores online, and that has seemed to work for them just fine.
If anyone else is contemplating (or actually DOING) online sales, I'd be interested to hear about it. I don't mean sites like "Virtual Sheet Music"
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/
where you can buy and download Public Domain works that have been made into pdfs. I mean those of you who are using the internet to distribute your own work. I think this is an idea worth pursuing.
Linda Worsley
--
Hear the music at:
http://www.ganymuse.com/
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