OK but the problem with not allowing discussion of Jeff’s (alleged, I will grant) sock puppets is that this why we’re where we are at. He cut off contact, and those sock puppets, when they existed at least, also blocked the user or users who made the accusations. But I’ve had the displeasure of having my comments in another forum posted to the blog where I wouldn’t be able to reply or to see them since I am blocked from the social media pages.

Here is my take.

Composers offering their work for free is not good. The whole notion of composers giving away their music for free and having public links on an indefinite basis is not a good business practice.

Caveat... I have given some of my music for 'free' at times, but only as a PDF that has been posted from my private website, and perhaps rarely on this forum. If you still have the PDF or a link to it, it will probably remain there, but there are no guarantees for 'free links' now, or in the future. I totally control my charitable donations from minute to minute.

Composers deserve to be remunerated. On my own website I license PDFs of my compositions. You send me a dollar for every musician in your choir, and you get to print that many copies from the PDF that I send to you. If you keep the PDF, I have a policy that if you lose or damage a copy, you can print a replacement. The license is good for the life of a musician that is employed in a particular geographical religious institution (church). You cannot pass the PDF to anyone else in any other musical organization. You are the sole licensee.

I am not 'making money' on this endeavor. I am spreading beautiful music, supporting the craft of composing sacred music, but the license keeps me in control of my copyrights and ownership of the music.

As for JO and his endeavor, well, when you conscribe your artistic creations to the etherworld (such as CCW), don't count on anything today, tonight or tomorrow. If you want a guarantee, get it in writing. If you have nothing in writing, all you have is nothing.

Easy come, easy go.
Blessed be the name of the Lord!

Where's the Tylenol.

With all that being said:

While my interests lean towards the contemporary side of things, Gregorian chant is part of our repertoire, and I do my best to thoroughly research options.

In my admittedly relatively small experience, I have found CC Watershed's website to be enormously frustrating. Hymnals and Mass settings changing names, while parts of the website referring to the old names don't get updated. Website is absurdly difficult to navigate. YouTube recordings of such poor quality I can not send them to my choir members to help them learn. Every single time I have evaluated a resource on the CC Watershed website, I have determined that the quality is too low, that using it would be too confusing, or both.

CC Watershed is often the first result on Google for anything related to English chant. And this is a big problem. CC Watershed has first mover advantage, but that advantage has been used to direct people who are just starting to learn about chant to a website that is supremely confusing, and requires great discernment to pick out the needles of good music out of the haystacks of mediocre and bad.

To be blunt, in my view CC Watershed sells fools gold that the English chant Mass, at least as on offer from them, is ready to go. At a previous parish, shortly before my time, a choir director using their resources (at least in part) went cold-turkey straight to all English chant. Half the congregation left before the initiative was abandoned. We still had some of their resources on bookshelves in the choir room, and thumbing through them, I was not impressed.

If you are going to tell people that they need to give up their folk music that they love because you have different music that is better, your different music needs to actually be better, and CC Watershed's music absolutely is not better. Some of their works may be of good quality, but I and many others without extensive chant backgrounds lack the expertise to identify them.

It would not surprise me if many well meaning priests and music directors have attempted to implement CC Watershed's music out of a desire to obey the liturgical documents of the church, to ruinous results.

One last comment: properly run charities will tell you where the money is going. They will make public budgets, annual reports, impact statements, etc.

This is the link to donate to CC Watershed. I am not able to find anything, at this link, or elsewhere on the website, that does any kind of accounting of where charitable funds go.

CC Watershed should be able to answer some basic questions about finances. How much money do they need? Is this for the website? Does Jeff pay himself a salary (which I would not object to, if transparently disclosed)? Are there development costs for new or updated resources? Does he need to hire full or part time people to properly maintain the ministry, and if so, at what price? I think Jeff needs to share some basic scope of how much money is needed and where it is going.

On a lighter note: Jeff is doing subscription the wrong way. A Patreon account where Jeff could offer tiers of perks for escalating levels of monthly donations could turn a much better return than the current strategy. From what I've seen from other content creators, people are surprisingly willing to be monthly supporters for simple perks like discord server access, weekly community videochats, or early accesses to new releases. You can even get people to pay you to be beta testers of new products this way.

From a Religious Perspective: While I understand the need to support oneself not everyone in the Catholic World has the means to spend money on resources. Free Chant Resources such as CCWatershed before and Gregobase for Example, have been invaluable to our community when we dont have money to buy liturgical books that can become very expensive. And a pay wall is just not something we are able to commit to. I think there has to be balance. If everything had a paywall there would be a lot of people unable to take advantage of resources. On the other hand I understand the need for individual composer to protect their music. But just to remember that no everyone in the Catholic World is able to contribute to such things, and so it is valuable to maintain free sources in places here or there.

@trentonjconn The Institute of Christ the King and Priest has them for Extraordinary Form and Musica Sacra obviously has them in their Resource Section. There is also the PDFs on Archive that can be found sometimes. Also there are some spanish sources online that have them.

There is a weird anti-capitalism bias on this board.

Not an anti-capitalist bias, but an IP-sceptical bias.

For you newbies out there, Austrian economist Jeffrey Tucker was managing editor of our journal Sacred Music from 2006 to 2014, and he definitely left a strong imprint on our organizational culture. You aren't going to find anyone more capitalist. But there's a strain in libertarianism that regards intellectual property as something that only exists because the State created it, that it's a literal privilege ("private law"). I'm not so much concerned with what "should be" as what IS, and in a world filled with people profiting from the law, I very much like getting my 2¢ as a composer.

As Catholics, we also have the issue of simony to address. Performing rights organizations don't collect for performance in the liturgy, which to me is right and just. But a capitalist would want that money. We complain about USCCB copyrights, and I agree that the texts of the liturgy should be free for all to use in the liturgy. But shouldn't that labor be protected? For that matter, how many of us have copied permanently out of print but technically in-copyright music? "Let he who is without sin..."

I've made my own music available for download as a kind of desperate Hail Mary pass of my career. There is little market for Latin-texted liturgical music that requires a moderately-competent choir. If I put it out there, it increases the chances of use in a concert, and BMI payments for one performance far outstrip any mechanical royalties.

And as a former librarian, I see digital propagation as a strategy for preservation, and preservation of liturgical music has been...not good.

FWIW, IP (like corporate charters) is a privilege created by the state - it's not "free market", as it were. (In the case of the Anglosphere, the basic statutory roots of copyright go back to Queen Anne, and then before that to royal grants of monopolies for printing music to ...Thomas Tallis and William Byrd...by Queen Elizabeth I.)

For CMAA, distributing most of our resources for free (and promoting other organizations which do the same) isn't really based on a policy preference about intellectual property: it's our way of removing a common obstacle to the adoption of sacred music.

However Jeff has a variety of accompaniments etc. and practice materials. And yeah; the Gregorian masses and the Credos and other chants were conveniently listed out individually. The ICRSP website also lists them that way. But again, it’s the extra materials that matter.

David, my budget right now for extra music expenses is zero. This really bites. I mean, I could pay for it out of pocket and then get it in the parish budget for next year (that is, for July 2027) but I’d still be on the hook for two months then a year’s subscription out of pocket without any transition period: many if not most parishes and church institutions start their budgets on July 1. That would have been a good time to transition.

Of course most of us are used to running at a deficit and no one bats an eye, but right now I can’t just ask for things: the request will be summarily denied. :(

Circumstances appear to have forced CCW’s hand.

What circumstances?

Seriously. CCW's blog entry about this states:

It came to their attention that a handful of loyal, generous donors have been funding everything for all these years—while the rest of the community consumes what’s offered without extending support. The argument was made that it was unjust for the burden to fall on the shoulders of only a few donors, since we receive millions of visits.

These aren't what I would call "circumstances." I would call "circumstances" to be some change from normal that hurts the bottom line. Such as increased costs of web hosting, having a large annual donor stop giving, etc. Or needing funds to support a new project, like a deep cleanup of the website's architecture.

Any of the hypothetical circumstances I've listed here would be viewed sympathetically by the liturgical music community. If it's one of these things, or something along similar lines, Jeff should tell us.

What Jeff has told us so far is not a change in circumstances, but a change in value judgement. According to the blog entry, Jeff and the board have decided it was unjust for a few to pay for access for everyone.

No one wants to assume bad intentions. But with an explanation that vague, we are left to our own imagination to fill in the blanks, and reasonable people may conclude that the best case scenario still seems shady.

Frankly, maybe my standards are too high, but if you work in the church even in a nonprofit that is not officially Catholic and is independent of a diocese, a religious order, a society of apostolic life etc., then you should be far less hasty about things, doubly so when I'm already asked to filter my thoughts (not only because of charity, but because perception of tone or being "nice" matters). I feel like we should not have to beg, and as I've said multiple times: Jeff has burned enough bridges that putting (former) contributors and also users in a position to come contact him, who absolves himself of all responsibility, is really not workable.

What Jeff has told us so far is not a change in circumstances, but a change in value judgement. According to the blog entry, Jeff and the board have decided it was unjust for a few to pay for access for everyone.

right, which, like anything else in the church, is already how it is, and it's the same with simialr projects, but people have also donated time, effort, and resources to CCW.

Yes I am serious, contemporaryworship92. The hints are there about increasing financial strain - “since 2006, American prices have gone up significantly” and “We have no endowment; we have no major donors; we run no advertisements; we have no savings.” If you are a charity trustee those two things add up to a serious problem you cannot just sit on.

I appreciate the post leads with a value judgment about the many people who use the site without donating. Certainly that is unfortunate and, as I say, I’m not trying to belittle the genuine upset here.

The hints are there about increasing financial strain - “since 2006, American prices have gone up significantly”

What costs are increasing? A properly run charity should be able to say something like "web hosting has gone up 25% in the last few years while donations remained even."

We have no endowment; we have no major donors; we run no advertisements; we have no savings.

This doesn't answer the question. What do you need money for?

I mean I know they are funded by donations, but is every charitable organization a "charity" in that sense? As a donor to CCW, do you really want granular accountability for how your money is spent? Obviously a lot of it goes to buying obscure old books and hymnals and then scanning them.

But is CCWatershed a charity?

According to Jeff Ostrowski himself: "We’re a tiny 501(c)3 public charity which exists solely by the generosity of small donors." But there he also says, "One predominant 'mission' or 'objective' of mine is to make sure the entire website always remains free, without even requiring a login." All that's being asked for in this thread is honesty, accountability, and transparency.

I was elected president by the board of directors. Like all officers, I serve at the pleasure of the board. (I’m not a board member.)

The people now being expected to pay for these resources ought to have a right to know who's calling the shots, period. If the current president can't stick to his own stated mission and objectives, maybe the board should consider replacing him with someone else. A comparison was made with CMAA membership, but I find it inapt because the forum and many resources remain totally free and available without a login, and also because the CMAA board members are listed in every issue of Sacred Music as well as on the website. Ostrowski plays too many games, which I why I got so fed up with him and his tomfoolery.

The old data available on candid.org for 2006-2012 is interesting: in one year donations surpassed $500k. If I'm reading that form right, most of the revenue went to salaries, contract labor, and other compensation, and probably that's reasonable when the group's main activity was in producing videos. After 2010, income from publishing rose but donations fell off, so spending on salaries declined to around $90k in 2012.

I support musicians being paid for their work, but my biggest concern is the free psalms. It was the only place to point people to for free Psalms.