When you are composing music and consider the self-publishing route beware the shopping with a regular monthly outlay sites unless you are going to be assured of selling 30 or 40 items of music per month. A brief history:
My music has been available online for many years now, I have always used ‘free’ sites to host the PDF downloads although never a shopping site, monthly rental format such as Shopify, as sheet music is never going to be in the blockbuster sales category. The ‘free’ part means there is no charge to host the titles and a percentage of the price is paid when something is sold. This model is great when used for recorded music on the Bandcamp site.
This week I was checking one of the hosts, the one where my music is all priced in dollars, and this was the banner message: Your current plan on Sellfy (Legacy) will be discontinued on Feb 1st, 2020. To keep your store active upgrade now. A pricey monthly fee for a site that has never promoted anything and has only hosted approximately 180MB of data. Bye bye to the time spent on creating the work in the right format for that site and for me goodbye Sellfy as it is not good business to pay for something that will never make a profit, composing is not a vanity project.
From February Payhip is the site for selling the sheet music as downloads, all priced in £s, with a few free musical (mainly percussion) crosswords and word searches. The recording are available at https://urbanskyline.bandcamp.com/ Some are free/pay what you want and others are priced in dollars despite my best efforts to change that into £s.
Thank you to everyone who has supported me in the past and hope to write music for many more of you to enjoy in the future.
Keep performing, composing, listening and having music as part of your life in 2020, best wishes, Peter.
Link to the Bandcamp site for recordings: https://urbanskyline.bandcamp.com
Link to download sheet music: https://payhip.com/prbpnews
© P.R.Birkby 2020
Peter R. Birkby 