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A message for choirs on behalf of all composers – particularly the young, struggling ones.
My message is very simple: you wouldn’t steal the coffee and biscuits for your choir break from your local supermarket. So don’t steal the music that you sing either! You can legally photocopy music, and as a rule of thumb, it’s okay if the composer has been dead for more than 70 years, or in the case of old music, if the edition is more than 25 years old. Otherwise, if you want to use it, please do pay for it.
There’s a wizard new licensing scheme that’s just been launched by Printed Music Licensing Ltd, who are affiliated to the Music Publishers Association, and it enables amateur choirs to photocopy as many as they need for their own use, and you pay on a sliding scale, but some of the money that you pay finds its way back to the publisher and the composer.
It’s a very good scheme, and you can find out all about it from the PMLL website. Happy singing.
I have sung quite a bit of your music in various choirs which was paid for before we used it, excellent music too.
Thank you and congratulations on defending the rights of composers (and authors) to receive due recompense for the use of their works. People don’t take copyright protection seriously enough, as I was taught in the copyright module of my information science degree, almost 40 years ago.