Marty's Story |
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As
a teenager I always loved playing my sax in church bands. I grew up
playing worship music here there and everywhere. I had a lot of fun,
made some great friends, learned a lot about music and got to use my
talents for God.
In late high school and early university I began to write songs to express the things I was going through. Some of them were praise and worship. At my church I found it really hard to get people to listen to what I’d been working on, let alone have them used in church. They didn’t seem to care about what I was doing. I
also saw other songwriters in a similar situation. They had a bunch
of great songs that no one took an interest in. I told myself that I
would one day start a distribution/publishing company that would help
up-and-coming songwriters get their material “out there”.
After
that I moved on and forgot about the idea. In 1995 Vicki D’Orzio
prophesied over me that I would be involved in worship and praise in a big
way. I remember thinking “No, I tried that.
No one cared. No one listened. I gave that up ages ago.” A
couple of years later, some friends of mine from a camp I directed called
Arts
Weekend were expressing their concern about the way that the gospel
music “industry” (particularly praise and worship music) is dominated
by a handful of highly commercial artists and distributors and that so much
great material goes unnoticed when so many songwriters just want to share
their work and encourage other people.
Bruce
Dickson put forward an alternative vision for Public Domain Christian
Music, a
place where, just like grannies shared recipes that they had
developed without looking to make a profit from it, song writers could share the songs that God had given them - a place for people who weren't going to be overly precious about copyright and making a whole lot of money out
of the praise and worship music which is meant to be primary about
glorifying God.
After
discovering that public domain meant that song writers would have to
completely give up ownership of their songs we
came up with the name
ShareSong.org
- a mix between a popular praise & worship label and
ShareWare
and
Linux software philosophy. The aim, to encourage and mentor
up-and-coming songwriters who just want to see their work used for God’s
glory.
We
started brainstorming… and drew up a plan
of where we wanted to go, and what we needed to do to get there. We then proceeded to
search the web for likeminded people. As expected, we found many
people trying to distribute their music online. What they
needed was a coordinated centralised vehicle that would enable them to reach a larger
audience.
While I was looking for likeminded people, Russ Reese stumbled across me. Russ was already developing FreePraiseAndWorship.org with a similar vision. We we agreed to join forces and develop the one database of songs to be shared between the two sites. Since then there have been many emails between Brisbane (Australia) and Idaho (USA) pushing forward together in the realisation in the vision and passion that God has given us. People
will put in a massive amount of time and effort for a cause they believe
in, even with no possibility of financial reward. The drive for
artistic expression can be so much more powerful than
money.
Five years later, more than six hundred songwriters have made more than 5000 of their songs available freely via the Internet on ShareSong.org. We have around 3500 visitors each day coming to download sheet music, chord charts, lyrics, mp3s, and real audio files of fresh new independent praise and worship music. It just keeps on growing - beyond our expectations, but funnily enough, in line with our wildest dreams. God is faithful to his vision. ShareSong.org will never make anyone wealthy or financially independent. It hasn’t been set up that way. But the rewards are far greater! We’re helping to facilitate a revolution in the way people get hold of gospel music. In Him
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