InTune

How our Data Team Helps You Find Your Song

Posted on Dec 23, 2008 by Monica.

Did you know that our Data Team starts researching Christmas sheet music in July? Our Data team (pictured here with some geeky robots ordered from the fine folk over at Think Geek) researches a song’s origin, arrangement, history, lyrics, style and copyright holder well before the song can be turned into a sheet music download. As you can imagine, the older a song gets, the harder it is to research — especially if there are different versions of lyrics in other languages.

You might understand why they have to research all the information they can about the song, but do you know why they need to track down the copyright holder? Not only does their research into copyright protect the rights for the song, but it also helps support the songwriter so they can continue doing the work they love. Believe it or not, many songwriters write music full-time for their “day job,” creating wonderful songs performed by pop artists the world over. You may recognize singer-songwriters like Ingrid Michaelson or Ben Folds, but many pop artists don’t write their own music. That’s where the songwriter comes in.

We asked the Data Team if they have learned anything new since they first started with Musicnotes.com. Touching over thousands of songs per week, one of them mentioned how they never knew Diane Warren had written so many songs. On Musicnotes.com, there are over two-hundred and fifty songs written by this contemporary songwriter and performed by Aerosmith, Trisha Yearwood, Christina Aguilera, Celine Dion and dozens of other well-known bands and performers. Another team member said that once they knew songwriters were writing songs day in and day out, they had a better appreciation of what a songwriter does and why copyright is so important. The example that was given was this, “If you walked into a McDonald’s to take a hamburger, people would tell you that’s wrong. So why would you take a song?”

To show our appreciation to our Data Team for all the work that they do, we gave them these battle-ready pencil sharpener robots, some pencils, and a bit of “chocolate” energy to get them through the day. (Yes, the robots are that cute and they really do work!)

After a few battles with their new robots, the Data Team got serious and mentioned how songwriting has evolved when they said, “Songs have survived longer than their initial performance.” For example, you might have known that classical music may be hundreds of years old, but did you know that many songs considered to be “old standards” evolved from popular-yet-timeless Broadway tunes? Some songs have been around for over fifty or one hundred years, from as far back as the early days of Vaudeville!

Not only does our Data Team research songs all day, they also put themselves into your shoes by taking a step back to see how you would think of a song. From the correct song title to the latest version of a song sung by your favorite artists, our Data Team does it all to make sure that they have the correct information for the song, the songwriter and you.

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And Now Customer Service Would Like to Say…

Posted on Nov 26, 2008 by Monica.

…Happy Holidays!

We recently extended our appreciation to our Customer Service department for all their hard work. With a little… okay a LOT of chocolate… we managed to break them away from the phones for a few minutes to take this picture. You can see they are keeping themselves warm with some hand-knitted scarves that were made by one of our fabulous customer service team members.

This time of year is exceptionally busy for them, as it is for many people who work in customer service. Not only are they working hard to answer your questions, but they’re often helping new customers, too. Our customer service team loves this time of year, though, because they enjoy listening to Christmas music.

Each member of our customer service team has their personal favorite Christmas song and in this special collection of Christmas songs, we feature the songs they love. This new collection of seven Christmas songs, available in the US and Canada, is called “Customer Service Favorite Christmas Songs.”

Our customer service team’s favorite songs include Happy Xmas (War is Over) written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Believe by Josh Groban from the movie The Polar Express, two selections from The Nutcracker ballet written by Peter Tchaikovsky, Carol of the Bells, the charity Christmas song Do they know it’s Christmas? and My Favorite Things from the musical Sound of Music sung by Julie Andrews.

As we move closer toward a bustling holiday season, our customer service team hopes that everyone enjoys listening to (or playing) your favorite holiday songs — no matter what style of music or song appeals to you.

What Christmas songs do you like listening to? Are there any favorite Christmas songs that you share in common with our customer service team?

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Introducing Monica Valentinelli to our Musicnotes.com Customers

Posted on Oct 01, 2008 by Monica.

Hi Musicnotes.com Customers and Fans!

My name is Monica Valentinelli and I join Musicnotes.com with a background in writing, music and a passion for community. Let me just say that I am very excited to be here at Musicnotes.com because, over the course of the next few months, we’re taking the idea of "community" to the next level.

To me, all Musicnotes.com customers have something in common — a love for music and the desire to play it, sing it and appreciate it. With that idea in mind, our marketing team is working together on ideas to promote and interact more with you — our musically talented customers — who range from beginning piano players to professional guitarists.

Just to give you a hint of "what’s-to-come," we’re going to be tapping into places like Facebook and MySpace, but are also looking at updating this blog more frequently with musically-related content that’s important to you. For me, the best part about Musicnotes.com embracing social media is that you get to choose how and when you’d like to interact with us. From answering your questions about music to highlighting
songwriters, our team has a lot of big ideas because
bringing you great content is our number one priority.

I hope you’ll stay sharp and in tune as we work on speaking to the music that’s in each and every one of us. In the meantime, I hope your performances are remarkable and your lessons are time well-spent.

Monica

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Web Programmer Needed (ASP,.NET,PHP)

Posted on Sep 16, 2008 by Monica.

Musicnotes is looking for a web programmer to join our team and work on both our Musicnotes.com and MXTabs web properties.

If you’re experienced with web programming (especially ASP, .NET and PHP) and are excited at the idea of working for one of the world’s leading e-commerce and web companies, be sure to take a look at this recent job posting.

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