Royalty Statement 2010 - Part 3

The third part of my royalty statement is a little nebulous.  It involved "licensing" - an umbrella term that involves all income other than print sales.  Most of it is listed as "MakeMusic Print Licensing."  MakeMusic is the company that makes Finale notation software and Smartmusic, which is a great online resource where teachers and students can play along with recordings and print parts.  So whenever someone pays to download one of my pieces online, I get a cut.

Some other pieces registered income from "Misc. 3rd Party Mechanical Licensing" which, I think, means that I get paid when someone records one of my pieces.  A lot of orchestras record their concerts and sell them as fund raisers and, in theory, the directors should let Alfred Publishing know and pay for the copyright.  In reality, only a handfull of honest directors have ever done this.

A third listing reads "Digital (Other Than Print) Licensing." and accounts for the highest single royalty on the licensing report.  I have no idea what that means.  Maybe something to do with video?  I can only guess, but whoever you are, thanks for doing whatever you did with Breeze In the Keys and please do it again.

You'll notice that there are no rankings listed in this post, which leads me to the most nebulous part of this report.  I have no idea how many MakeMusic downloads there were or how many recordings of each piece were sold - just that a certain lump-sum dollar amount is assigned to each title. And no two amounts are the same. I'd suspect that the royalty rate depends on the number of downloads or CD's burned, so it's hard to specify exactly.

Agincourt Video

After updating my website recently, I came across a YouTube video that I didn't get to include. It's a really good performance of Agincourt. Check it out:


They do a nice job! Good work!

In other news, I got my upgrade of Finale in the mail yesterday! I've been using Finale 2007b and upgraded to Finale 2010 (I've mentioned it before, but Finale is the computer program I use to write music). The improvements over three years are negligible and mostly cosmetic, but the longer I wait, the more expensive the upgrade gets. Now I just have to find a way to get it on my computer. Hopefully, I'll have it installed this weekend.