Stuart's sheet music

Through my Kingsway work, I've been involved in an exciting new project to make sheet music more readily and easily available.

It's a website called www.kingswaysongs.com. There you can download each song you want as an Acrobat .pdf file (most people have Acrobat Reader on their computer, and if they don't, they can download it for free from www.adobe.com), and click on "get Adobe Reader". Nearly all the active Thankyou Music catalogue is on there now.

The format is superior to the traditional songbook in several ways.

1) You can buy just the songs you want - you don't need to spend £15 on a songbook for the three songs you're looking for!

2) You don't need to photocopy - just print more perfect copies from your printer (but see the comment below on copyright).

3) The website acts as a songfinder. You can search for songs by a particular theme, by key, by general tempo - you can even find a song which contains a particular word or phrase. So it's a useful tool for preparing to lead, as well as a song resource.

What are the drawbacks?

1) It's an expensive way to buy a lot of songs! At £1.49 per song, buying, say, 50, is going to be prohibitively expensive. However, kingswaysongs.com are talking about making special 'package deals' that would rival songbook prices.

2) Copyright. You can't just make numerous copies of the file. You can purchase multiple copies from the website at a reduced rate, but the best way is to get your church to purchase an MRL (music reproduction licence) as an add on to your words CCL licence. The licence allows you to make multiple copies from your files and from your songbooks, provided you report the number of copies you've made. And remember - if you are currently photocopying from songbooks, you need this licence anyway to do it legally.

3) Currently the songs are all from the Thankyou Music catalogue (for copyright reasons). And although Thankyou Music is by far the most used catalogue in the UK (with all the songs from Matt Redman, Tim Hughes, Paul Oakley, Keith Getty,Noel Richards, myself, and tons of others, as well as Hillsong from Australia), it does mean you can't get Make Way, Vineyard or Integrity songs on it.

For those who are looking for a particular group of songs, or are looking for help to find songs on a particular theme, it's the perfect resource. There's even an audio link so you can hear a clip from the song to help you decide if it's waht you're looking for. I think it's a fantastic resource - but of course I'm biased! Check it out for yourslef through the link above.

Stuart Townend