NewMusicalTheatre.com, the first website ever exclusively devoted to selling sheet music by musical theater writers, launches today. The e-commerce site will start out selling sheet music written by Nick Blaemire (Glory Days), Adam Gwon (Ordinary Days), Joe Iconis (The Black Suits, The Plant that Ate the Dirty Socks, Things to Ruin), Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk (Henry & Mudge, Tales from the Bad Years, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown), Ryan Scott Oliver (Darling, Mrs. Sharp, Rated RSO), Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dogfight, Edges).
This handful of up-and-comers has netted many of the prizes and laurels available to young writers in the theater community. Among them, they've won four Jonathan Larson awards, two Ed Kleban awards, two Rodgers awards, one Fred Ebb award, as well as songs featured on television, several off-Broadway and regional productions, and one Broadway production. Many more writers will be added over the coming months.
The goal of NewMusicalTheatre.com is to create a direct connection between people who write music and people who want to perform and listen to it. It provides an affordable and legal one-stop shop for musical theater fans and performers to discover and share the work of self-published writers. Site features include custom songbooks, song ratings, and a search functionality that caters to singers browsing for new audition songs. It aspires to foster a dynamic community where fans and actors can directly connect and impact writers while they're still struggling to make a living on their music.
Ultimately, this will be a place where actors and fans not only find and purchase music, but also a place where people go to browse for new writers, to find lyrics, share their thoughts, and even interact directly with the writers of tomorrow.
"The site's an extension of what we all do in the real world -- support each other's work. To have a site that not only gets our music out to people who want to sing it, but helps those people discover other young writers, is amazing. It's bursting the doors of the new musical theater community open to the whole world," says site member Adam Gwon, composer of Ordinary Days. NewMusicalTheatre.com will bring writers, actors, and fans together to share the music in a safe, dynamic - and most importantly - legal way.
The site was created by writers for writers as an alternative to traditional publishing. Most songs have mp3s or video samples. NewMusicalTheatre.com uses new technology to protect writers from having their sheet music illegally downloaded by password protecting the downloaded file with the customer's credit card number. While protecting the writer, it also allows customers to have more control over their purchase. Rather than having to print their sheet music right away, they can keep the sheet music on their computer for continued access to the file and multiple printings.
When Jeff Marx (co-creator of Avenue Q) previewed the site, he said, "Whoever thought of making your credit card number the password to unlock the downloaded file was an absolute genius. That changes everything and serves everyone. This is going to be bigger than porn."
NewMusicalTheatre.com is dedicated to the distribution and promotion of a new generation of musical theater writers who self-publish their own digital sheet music. This is an e-commerce website designed by writers for writers. It allows fans to directly support the writers of tomorrow's big hits.
