The Canadian Musical Theatre Database is a catalogue of Canadian musicals and their creators which serves as a platform through which we can improve the artistic lives of musical theatre creators, educators and producers across the country and beyond.
No.
The site is free to use for everyone. We do, however, charge for access to perusal materials.
In order to be featured on the site, your work must have had at least one reading, workshop or production for which the majority of artists involved were paid at least minimum standard
Not yet. It's on our list. If you would like to make changes, please reach out to us at info@cmtdb.ca.
This entire endeavour was initially sparked by Arkady Spivak, Producer and CEO of Talk Is Free Theatre. In discussions with TIFT regular (and part-time web developer) Michael Torontow--who has since become TIFT's Artistic Director--they decided it would be great to make this an online catalogue.
They enlisted the help of Peter Jorgensen, Co-Artistic Producer of Patrick Street Productions, to help obtain funding, and to help manage and develop the project.
Alana Freistadt, also a TIFT regular, has been on board every step of the process.
And we can't forget Chantal Gering and Griffin Hewitt, who have been instrumental in populating our database with dozens of great musicals waiting to be produced.
A “loaner” libretto and/or piano/vocal score someone can acquire to help decide if they want to license and produce your creation. In our case, we provide interested parties a digital copy indicating that the show is not yet licensed for production.
To keep CMTdB free for artists, we will charge users a small fee for your perusal materials to help generate the revenue we need to maintain the site.
Users have the option of ordering à la carte or purchasing an annual, all-access membership.
The libretto and piano/vocal score each cost $4.95. They are sent in PDF format with “Perusal Copy” clearly marked on each page.
Individual memberships are $99 per year, while institutions (e.g., colleges, universities, etc.) pay $499 per year, which grants access to anyone who is a member of that institution.
Note: Pricing structure is subject to change; we'll give plenty of notice if we do.
To be featured on CMTdB, your creation must have had a minimum of one professional reading, workshop, or full-length production, so we assume you do have something to share with us. We think it’s super-cool if you went old school and distributed your materials in handwritten form, but we’ll need these in digital.
We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the Canada Council for the Arts for their initial support, but we do not receive any on-going or renewable funding. While we will continue to pursue granting opportunities to build exciting new features in the months and years to come, we need a steady stream of revenue to keep the site maintained and running smoothly.
Darn right, you should! And you will.
We will give you 75 percent of what we collect on à la carte orders, payable at the end of our fiscal year (September 30).
As for the annual memberships, 75 percent of those fees will be divided among the creators featured on the site, based on the number of titles each creator has available for perusal. So, say CMTdB has five titles listed on the site. If person A created one of those and person B created four, then person B will receive four times more of the cut of membership fees than person A.
At the end of the fiscal year, we will make these financial reconciliations publicly available and send you a check for your cut.
Yup! We don't advise planning on paying your rent with your CMTdB royalties, but if all goes well, you'll get a little money from the sky each year.
Great question. We want to stress that CMTdB is not a licensing site and we do not require any kind of exclusivity in representation of your work, nor would we restrict you from sharing your materials however you see fit.
We simply endeavour to provide a service, enabling quick and easy access to a comprehensive catalogue of works by Canadian artists so that more of our fantastic, homegrown talent can be celebrated in theatre seasons from coast to coast and beyond.
We don't think you are, but we certainly could be. If so, we would love to hear from you with thoughts or questions. Reach out at info@cmtdb.ca.
We sure have. There is a lot of excitement about the idea, particularly from the education sector, so our next goal is to create a sales platform for individual pieces of sheet music.
