Here at Watchfire Music our customer service staff recently forwarded to me the following email from a most gracious lady.

“Hi.  I appreciate your emails and input, but I have a very large library of solos and do my own research for each Sunday’s solo, and your prices are very high … so, unfortunately, much as I appreciate your work and input, I have been doing the same for myself for 20 years and cannot afford to add the cost of your product … Thank you and God Bless you.”   J.K.

Upon reading I had no objection to the fact that J.K. was not interested in using our Solo Thoughts product, choosing instead to do her own research within her own church library – my wife, Julia, who was the soloist at the Christian Science Mother Church for the past seven years and is the Director of Digital Sheet Music for WFM did not even use the product all the time, preferring also sometimes to work from her own enormous and well organized library of music.  For Julia, Solo Thoughts was a great back up, like a good insurance policy.

To each his/her own.

We certainly get enough praise from grateful soloists and Music Committee chair people all over the world.  The letters seem to pour in nearly every day.  In fact what struck me as odd was that this was the first letter we had ever received from someone telling us that they did NOT use our product.  Why would someone take the time to do that?

Curious …

So upon second reading, I began to look at it from a different angle.  Then it hit me.  This was not a letter telling us that they did not use our product; this was rather a letter complaining that our prices were too high.

Well, that really got me going.

Musicnotes.com. the largest digital sheet music company in the world and consequently the standard setter, sells their music in a range of $5.25 to $5.75 per title.  That’s for one song, one song download.  We sell our titles for $6.95, but that gives the buyer the right to print 2 copies – one for the vocalist and one for the pianist/musician.  That’s actually $3.48 per title.  On the average about $2 less.

We watch our prices and the prices of our industry very closely making sure that we stay lower than the average cost.  We want you never to write a letter like this and in seven years of doing business, this is our first.

Perhaps she did not read carefully enough and missed the really good deal she was getting.  Perhaps she’s used to simply copying the sheet music she buys or uses from her church library, working from her copy and giving the other to her accompanist.  Perhaps she does not understand that to copy the song without paying for it is illegal.  It’s illegal because it cheats the composer, the lyricist and all the people that worked on putting the product together so that she might sing the song and do her soloist job.

Think of it this way: If everybody did it this way, we musicians would make only half the money we deserve on the sales of our efforts.  I can’t think of another business that works on such a principle.

File sharing is the ruin of the music industry.  Our industry today is staggering under the weight of this disastrous problem.  Recorded music has even now become free to the average Joe who is internet savvy.

Before Watchfire Music and digital downloads I used to create my own sheet music of my own songs on good heavy stock paper (so that it wouldn’t fall off the piano or music stand in performance), with a nice color cover, and ample print space for the best sight-reading.  I sold the music for $5.95, which was the going rate at stores in NYC.  It cost me more to make it than I made off the sale.

Why did I do it?  To get my music out there.  To share the music with the world.  I looked at the loss as promotion, but always knew in my heart that I was, in essence, giving away my music or even paying you to listen.

In the 1950s, as a wee tot, I could buy a 45 rpm single song record for $1.  (Yes, it had another song on the B side, but we never played the B side – we only bought it for the A side and the record companies always put the weakest album songs on the B side).  Today, over 60 years later, I buy that same single song for that same $1 – in fact, for 99 cents!

Interesting that I, as a composer, haven’t had a raise in over 60 years while the value of a dollar has decreased dramatically.

And our non-customer complains about the prices being too high?!  I am once again staggered by the total misconception of the public in their understanding of the plight of the musician today.  The amount of time it takes to create a great song, record it, create the sheet music, create a 120 page document of intense and specific research called Solo thoughts, etc., etc. does not come close to the reward received in monetary value.

The real reward is that someone is out there singing our music, that somehow our work and sweat to create has paid off in the understanding that we have inspired lives and lifted thought.  The monetary reward does not come close to the original effort and time put into the effort.  I repeat this so that it may be emphasized.  The creation of music in today’s crazy mixed up world is not for financial gain.  Let’s face it; it barely puts the food on the table.

We do this because we have to.  For many of us, it’s all we know – music.  I know, bring on the strings, underscore this paragraph in a minor key, but the fact is that if the perception is that somebody’s gouging the customer here with their high prices, somebody else is completely out of tune with the realities of today.

On top of that, Watchfire Music brings you NEW music, fresh from the hearts and minds of today’s best composers in our religion, oftentimes music that was written just last week in response to a world issue, a Sentinel article that was recently written, a testimony just heard in church.  I doubt that our non-customer’s church library stays current with the changes and demands of the 21^st century.

We are here to revolutionize music in our church, like-minded religions and spiritual thinkers everywhere.  We are here to advance thought.  Nothing wrong with the old, the tried, the true – the classic.  We offer that as well.  All this music has its place in the world.

So I ask J.K. to reconsider her complaint.  Consider this also:  The cost in time and monies spent of making an orchestrated 10 song CD in today’s world runs at about $10,000 per song.  That does not even include the time it takes to write the song.  That’s a ballpark total of a hundred grand for an album.  Then we turn around and sell one song for 99 cents!  Yikes!!  Generating the sheet music is an additional expense.  Here we can actually charge a hair or two more to keep the noses slightly above water.  None of these costs come close to the cost of promotion.  It’s a nearly impossible scenario.  You do the math.

But we do it because the rewards are beyond monetary.  That’s is truly what keeps us afloat.

I’m sorry, but the misconception that we are in any way overcharging for our product is simply that — a misconception of the realities of the day, of the times and of our business.