Oh wow! We can make money here, now! Great idea, Robert. Not that I'll make anything, but if someone wants to help me pay for these really cute shoes I saw yesterday, that would be great!

That is the whole idea. I've had a couple of questions from people wanting to donate directly to our artists to I thought...why not? Here is the entire message for you who were not included in my email (addressed only artists on the site of course).


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Dear artist of Piano Society,

We are about to implement two new features on Piano Society which may be of financial interest to you.

Artist Donation Program

This enables our listeners to donate to you whatever they think your efforts are worth. While this is unlikely to pay anybody’s bills, we believe it can provide some welcome extra income for our artists. Of each donation, 80% will be for you, and 20% will be for Piano Society, this money going towards running the site and improving its services. How it will work is as follows.

You will get a Donate button on your biography page. Donations are made to Piano Society and we will each month transfer your share of the amount to you, provided it exceeds $100. The reason for this threshold is that we want to avoid the extra charge that banks take for transfers under $100. You will be provided a login on the site to see the current status of donations made to you.

We will transfer the money to your bank account, or alternatively, to your PayPal account (you can register at www.paypal.com for free). Details about either need only be provided when it is time for this to happen.

Initially, you do not need to do anything to be included in this donation program. But do respond to this email if you do NOT want to be included in the donation program, or if you have any questions, remarks, or suggestions.

CD/DVD program

For those of you who have produced CD’s or DVD’s, we will provide an opportunity to sell your CD or DVD from Piano Society. You will decide the price yourself (at a minimum of $5 as otherwise the administration fees take up too much). As we currently do not have the resources to burn and ship CD/DVD’s, you will have to will to burn and ship the CD/DVD yourself. Whenever someone buys your CD/DVD, Piano Society will provide you the shipping address.

Piano Society will advertise your CD/DVD from your biography page, from every genre and composer page which contains music from your CD/DVD and also, when the CD/DVD is released, on the main Piano Society page. For an idea of what this may look like, check Avguste Antonov’s biography at http://pianosociety.com/cms/index.php?section=794. When it comes to transfer the income, the same rules apply for the Artist Donation Program (it needs to exceed $100). If you are interested in this option, please send information about your CD/DVD to robert@pianosociety.com.

I am currently updating each biography with a Donation button but it will take quite some time before I am finished so please be patient.

2007-11-01
Robert Ståhlbrand, Piano Society

Hooah!!!
The project is officially under way
Nice

Yep, not quite as fast as I planned it but still, it's on the way.

Hooah
A suggestion. How about not allowing people to save the recordings on their computers?
They would still be able to listen to it,but just not save it on their comp

I've PM-ed Robert on this, but in case multiple people are adding the donation functionality I thought I'd also post on the forum.

All artist(e)s, whether male or female currently have the following text by their "donate" button:

"Do you like this artist and the recordings she submits to the site?"

Perhaps "she" could be modified to "they"?

Extremely interesting new functionality by the way. Good luck with setting it up.

pb

I changed the she thing to he/she when you noticed me. I have thought about the streaming thing and about 100 other options as well (ask Chris ) but considered this to be the most easy and harmless thing to start with. There are many option for pianists making money from pianosociety but for me personally, it will drain me of resources as time is my limiting factor. One step at the time and we see what this test leads to.