Self publishing

2018-01-18 02:33 am

It had been on my mind for a while to ask about this topic. I’m thinking of setting up a website to promote scores and offer them for preview and sale.

How achievable would this be with NWC? People would need to use NWV viewer. The scores would have to appear as a preview copy. How do you protect copyright
and avoid piracy?

Anyone else doing this?

Thoughts?

Re: Self publishing

Reply #1 – 2018-01-18 02:44 am

I would print to PDF rather than try to use a viewer image.

With a PDF you can set a watermark that shows when the PDF is displayed. If you sell a score, they download the unwatermarked version. You can also lock the PDF with a password that the end user would need in order to open and print the file.

Re: Self publishing

Reply #2 – 2018-01-18 08:18 am

... and, times being as they are, you'll have to create acceptable sound renditions: People expect to be able to listen to music on a music website - one reason being that many, even professional musicians will not be able to read (without playing) your scores!!

First, the NWC Viewer idea is, in practice, probably not a good one: It relies on a suitable sound synthesizer on the viewer's computer, over which you do not have any control. Thus, your score might be judged by a bad or even wrongly configured MIDI machinery that you do not know anything about. Therefore, you must provide ready-made sound like MP3s or OGGs.

To produce this, you need a DAW and suitable soundfonts/virtual instruments (unless you have an orchestra+choir who will play your pieces ...), and all the necessary knowledge to get an acceptable sound result - which is very hard and much work, in my experience. For brass instruments, the typical soundfonts are lacking quality - there are virtual instruments around, but they are expensive (and I have no experience with them). For choir, what do you do with the lyrics? - a choir singing "aaah" all the time is not what I, and many, would expect or find acceptable; but the tools out there for making it sing words are either very expensive or do not work, in my experience (anyone knows anything better?); and our church choir ... well, it's quality is not something I'd like to use to promote my pieces in quite a few cases (even though I have done it).

Last, I think that one has to show a "movie rendition" of the score (e.g. MP4) in these days - there is some short thread somewhere here about this: This "hooks up" the listener much much more than a mere sound rendition (say MP3). But this, again, is something to be mastered.

All this I'd like to do ... but, well, job, family, making music, composing all have higher priorities ... so it's a long-term project, at least for me.

H.M.

Re: Self publishing

Reply #3 – 2018-01-18 11:09 am

Wow, those are great points on things I had a vague but not specific idea about. I was thinking about recording some demos with my excellent musician friends but need to figure out that process better. I do have live recordings by various groups but the quality isn’t quite there yet to use them as promotion and I know the quality of the composing is often judged this way.

I need to do more research about the topic. Thanks for your thoughts.