August Newsletter - Top 500 songs

Song writers want to know how many times their songs are being downloaded and used in churches. Worship leaders want to know how they can quickly find songs that other people have found useful.

You can now view the top songs being downloaded at http://sharesong.org/top500.htm

For a limited time we have made the featured songs the 20 most downloaded songs - http://www.sharesong.org/worship_music.htm

Congratulations to the top 10 songs downloaded since we updated the database
in April:

1. "I Will Lift" by W. Duane Clark [29/day]
2. "I Want To Know You More" by Dennis Burnett [23/day]
3. "You Alone" by Carly Grant [16/day]
4. "High And Lifted Up" by Robbie Cochran and David Poindexter [16/day]
5. "Holy Spirit Fill This Place" by Roger Crozier [13/day]
6. "Jesus Your Love" by Christine Fitzell [13/day]
7. "All I Need" by Fiona Waites [13/day]
8. "Be Strong in The Lord" by John McKenna, Paul Collard and Ken Davis [11/day]
9. "Abide With Me" by Ken Davis based on the old hymn [11/day]
10. "Bread of Life" by Robbie Cochran and David Poindexter [11/day]

We're also working on integrating this data into the search engine in the near future. We'll also be providing some better ways for you to promote your favourite songs to your friends.

Sharing MORE praise and worship music freely

We've been venturing into the world of search engine optimisation recently. And it seems to be working. Over the last three months the traffic at ShareSong.org has increased from 450 per day to 700 per day. You can check out the updated stats page at http://sharesong.org/statsistics.htm

FreePraiseAndWorship.org is getting about 550 visits per day. And between the two sites (SS & FPW) we're serving over 1000 songs each and every day!

It's encouraging to see that more than six percent of the visitors are coming back again during the month to download more material. Our goal of being a valuable resource worship leaders and facilitating the sharing of more praise and worship music freely via the Internet is progressively being realised!

ShareSong.org Live Recording

The Brisbane (Australia) ShareSong.org gang are in the final throws of preparations for the ShareSong.org Live Recording/First Birthday Party on August 15. Sixteen songwriters are lined up with more than 40 songs to record during the day and evening of intimate worship.

In the next edition of this newsletter we're looking forward to telling you about how things went with an article, photos, a quicktime video and more than 30 new praise and worship songs for you to download freely.

We hope that this event will pave the way for other groups of songwriters to get together to record their songs for publication on the Internet.

Survey says...

Seventy seven percent (77%) of people who completed the online survey at ShareSong.org believe that there are NOT currently enough distribution methods for praise and worship songwriters to get their music out. Eighty four (84%) percent of respondents believe that it is only a matter of time before praise and worship music follows the open sharing principles of mp3.com, Napster, Linux and ShareWare software. And ninety eight percent (98%) of people would like to see more praise and worship music freely available via the Internet?

The Word in Song

ShareSong.org has been working with The Word in Song to help promote their series of CDs of scriptures put to song for meditation, memorisation and worship. Songs from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, 2 Corinthians & 2 Peter are now available free online, with more to come in the future. You canpreview/download all seven albums from www.ShareSong.org/twis.htm If you want you can download an order form to purchase CDs at www.ShareSong.org/thewordinsong.htm.

Newsletter list cracks 2000

We've now got over 2000 people on this newsletter list as more and more people register to keep in touch with what's happening. Thanks for sticking with us! If at any stage you want to get off you can simply send an email to ss-newsletter-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Prayer

Please pray for the work that God is doing, and if it is His will, that
ShareSong.org and FreePraiseAndWorship.org would continue to grow to serve further. Please also pray that God would provide the people and the resources that we need to continue.

In Him

Marty Kendall
ShareSong.org Coordinator