A License is the agreement that allows you (the licensee, if you happen to be looking for a fancy term) permission to do certain things that are the exclusve rights of the copyright owner. At SacredMusicDownloads.com, those rights include permission to download, print, copy and perform the musical content within certain bounderies.
why are the licenses so expensive? when i buy an octavo for my choir, they only cost 1.75 or maybe 2.00.
why is music so expensive?
In reality, music from SacredMusicDownloads.com is less expensive, not more. Why do I have this feeling that I am going to say this a thousand times. Music from SacredMusicDownloads.com is less expensive, not more. Let's do the math. A choir director of a large choir of 45 perhaps usually buys 50 copies of an anthem. If the average price of an anthem $1.75 He gets a discount of 10%, which usually covers the shipping charges. He has spent $87.50 for the anthem. On SacredMusicDownloads.com, he purchases a license at $20 and downloads the file. But we really need to factor in the cost of making copies for his choir. The anthem is 8 pages. The piece prints on 4 sides of an11X17 piece of paper. At Kinkos, each copy isgoing to be around .50 cents. With a total expense of approximately $25 at Kinkos. If the Church has a decent copy machine, copies could be even cheaper. churches will their own copy machine making the expense less than that. So when you compare the expense of the large church choir spending approx $90 per anthem and at SacredMusicDownloads.com closer to $35 or $40 per anthem. Often AzaleaCircle will make available scores that are reductions of the piece that don't include the entire accompaniment which results in less paper and less copies to make.
We are doing a choir festival in our town and would like to do it with the massed choir. Is there a license available for festivals by which after purchasing a license, we can make copies for other choirs participating in the festival?
Yes, this is a possibility. The license fee would depend on how many choirs are participating and the total numbers of singers. Either way, a Festival license would be a less expensive alternative than if each choir purchased a separate license. For more information, contact us.