Chantage — Free concert and a Prom

Free concert at St Paul’s Knightsbridge

Join Chantage for a free evening of music with one of the top college choirs in the United States, with a beautiful programme that includes works by Lauridsen, Stanford, Nelhybel, Allain, Chydenius, Byrd, and American folk songs and spirituals. Founded in 1946, the Luther College Nordic Choir has an international reputation and has performed at some of the most prestigious venues in the United States, including the Lincoln Center, New York, the Kennedy Center, Washington DC, and the Crystal Cathedral, L.A.

Date: Wednesday 30 May

Time: 7.30pm

Venue: St Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, 32a Wilton Place London, SW1X 8SH (map)

Tickets: On the door, on the day

Chantage at the Proms! 

On 28 July 2012, Chantage makes history. At the world’s greatest classical music festival — the BBC Proms — they sing the première performance of Benedict Mason’s meld with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance that will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Mason describes his work as a reflection of ‘tension and ritual; with dramas in opposition’, the perfect companion to Rued Langgaard’s symphony of brevity and eternity Ixion.

Date: Saturday 28 July

Time: 7.30pm

Venue: Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AP (map)

Tickets: http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/features/tickets

Requiem for Dr John Birch

Dr John Birch died on Saturday 28 April, aged 82. He was Director of Music at All Saints, Margaret Street, from 1953 to 1958 and thereafter Organist of Chichester Cathedral and the Temple Church. He was also senior professor of organ at the Royal College of Music. Here is the Telegraph's obituary.

His Funeral Mass will be held at All Saints, Margaret Street, on Tuesday 15 May at 6.30pm. The music includes parts of the Duruflé Requiem and some organ fireworks from Stephen Disley at the end.

Share Your News

What's happening in your world? Is it of interest to DepList members and visitors to our site? Use the button at the foot of this page to tell us of anything that might be newsworthy. If I think it's interesting and relevant, I'll post it here and/or on Twitter.

We Are Now a Dot-Com

It's hard luck on the person who sent me an email from Australia yesterday asking whether I'd be interested in buying the DepList.com domain name, which was about to expire and be released to the public. "Of course," I said. "How much?" A few hours later, the response came, with a suggested price of US$450. "You must be joking," I replied. Or words to that effect.

Meanwhile I did some research on WHOIS and discovered the place where it might be possible to acquire the domain for $69, just as long as no other bidders entered the game. So I contacted the Australian to say I was going to do my own bidding, thank you very much, and that my maximum bid would be very low. I craftily added that I certainly wouldn't be interested in any subsequent "offers" from anyone who outbid me, because I didn't particularly need the dot-com name. It would be nice to have if I could get it cheaply, I said, but it was not essential for my site's success. I had in fact contacted the previous owner of deplist.com some years ago, but he was not prepared to sell it. My tactical response at the time was to buy the deplist.net and deplist.org names, thereby adding value to my domain and reducing the value of his by a tiny fraction!

Switching back to yesterday's adventure, I hoped that my feigned disinterest would thus deter my speculator from bidding against me, and off I went to try my luck with SnapNames, the site that WHOIS told me to visit if I wanted to place a bid. I put in my maximum offer and waited.

In theory, I might have been able to get it more cheaply later on (if no one registers an interest in a name, SnapNames doesn't bother to acquire it), but I didn't want to run the risk of a "domain acquisition specialist" (i.e. shark) buying it in the interim and then trying to sell it to me for some outrageous sum. Whether or not it would be bought depended on whether it was worth anything, so I checked with some valuation sites. Two of these estimated the deplist.com name to be worth $3,000 (as opposed to $600 for deplist.co.uk and $0 for several other .com names I put into the calculator for comparison). I was careful to choose valuation sites which estimated the value of domain names per se rather than the value of websites, so that figure of $3,000 suggested to me that I should snap it up while I could. The .com names are generally worth more than .co.uk names. Even .co without the "m" at the end is a less valuable suffix.

As auction-opening time approached, I went back to SnapNames to see what was happening. Fortunately, no-one had come to bid against me — least of all the Australian who'd been hoping to take $450 from me — and I secured the dot-com for the minimum opening bid of $69. I shall remain eternally grateful to my Antipodean tipster shark for letting me know that the domain was about to become available.

Many dot-com names that come up for sale do not remain on offer for more than a second. They are grabbed instantly by outfits like the one that was offering to sell deplist.com for $69 before it had even come onto the market. The more valuable the name, the more likely it is to be snapped up the instant it is released. Sites like SnapNames fire off automated requests to buy them at the rate of several times per second, starting from just before they are released on the market, so there's no way individuals like us can compete against them. Such sites compete with each other too for good domain names, but sometimes they have special arrangements with the registrars that are about to put expired names on sale — a bit like a house vendor having an exclusive contract with a single agent to sell the property. Which is how deplist.com came to be listed on WHOIS as being for sale via SnapNames.

It's taken eight years to acquire our .com, and it now complements the .net and .org in our stable — all the names that matter. Here's an extended article on the subject of acquiring domain names by someone who had a similar experience to mine and who also used SnapNames to acquire his domain name.

Stats, Easter 2012

From 1st March until Easter Sunday this year (i.e. Lent and Holy Week), 68 job adverts passed through DepList. Some of these adverts contained job offers for more than one musician and/or more than one gig, so the total number of people booked via DepList may have been higher. There were very few if any re-postings of unfilled jobs, so it seems DepList has reached a point of healthy self-sustainability. In other words, we have enough members to provide the necessary cover at peak periods, when recruitment is normally difficult.

Membership has increased very slowly over the years. This is partly because almost as many members drop off after a few years as apply to join. Classical singing is a highly competitive and often insecure profession. Opportunities for organists and choral directors are fewer still. Most members work freelance. Many stick at it for a few years, then switch to more lucrative occupations or salaried jobs, at which point they let their membership lapse. A very few are lucky enough to make it big time. When they have agents working on their behalf they longer need the type of service that DepList provides. I'm tempted to create a DepList celebs page at some point! A very few stalwart and loyal members have been with us since the very beginning. Others leave and rejoin.

There was a big drop-off in membership when we first started charging fees. Half our members decided they didn't want to pay to belong. Little by little the numbers have crept back up and we are now almost back to our peak of 300. This is probably an ideal size for DepList in its current format. Will DepList change? I don't know. It depends on what the market demands and how the technology continues to evolve.

The £10 fee (unchanged since it was first imposed) covers my overheads but not much of my time. My reward is to see something good in operation that I wish had existed when I started singing professionally three decades ago.

Making Good on Good Friday

It is at times like this when DepList really comes into its own. Imagine a situation where, for whatever reason, you are short of a tenor on a Good Friday. It's twenty minutes past eleven and the service is at 2 p.m. with a rehearsal at 1 p.m. In the old days pre-Internet and pre-mobiles (in my day actually!), this was a pretty hopeless situation. You might make ten or twenty (landline) phone calls to all the tenors in your address book. Some calls would ring and ring and not be answered at all. Others would turn out to be wrong numbers or else answered by a landlady who said the tenor had moved out — and no, she did not have his new number. The rest would be answered by recorded messages from tenors who were probably at that very moment travelling to jobs they'd been booked for ages ago. Spare tenors are hard to find at the best of times. For Holy Week, they need securing several weeks in advance. So half an hour later, you still haven't got your tenor, your stress levels rise, and it's getting too late to salvage the situation.

Today, someone placed an advertisement at 11.20 a.m. for a tenor to sing at 2 p.m. with a rehearsal at 1 p.m. It took less than ten minutes to fill that job.

It is interesting to think that when DepList began, mobile phones were still comparatively rare. There were plenty of musicians who didn't own one. Smartphones had not been invented, and receiving emails on mobiles was either impossible or impossibly fiddly. For many years, most of us could only access our DepList messages from a conventional desktop PC. Now DepList messages can be retrieved by anyone on the move. It seems that DepList has become even more useful as technology has evolved.

We wish all our members and visitors a Happy Easter.

Change of Address for Forms

The web addresses of many of the forms on our website have changed. If you are using forms that you have bookmarked, please look to see whether the address begins with www.jotform.com. If it does, please add the letters eu before the dot-com, so that the first part of the address looks like this: www.jotformeu.com

Don't forget to bookmark the amended address.

Let's Make DepList even Busier

I have never known DepList as busy as it has been this December. We've been averaging half a dozen jobs per day, which is normally our weekly average during the rest of the year (except at Easter). Yet no matter how many jobs come in, they all seem to get filled. If you have found DepList useful, please spread the word. We're always happy to consider new membership applications from suitably qualified candidates, and the more job offers come in the happier our members will be. Outside advertisers can have one free advert to see how effective DepList is.

I would like DepList to spread its wings instead of sitting firmly within the M25, where it seems to be stuck at present. What about our other capital cities in the United Kingdom? And our cathedral cities and university towns. If you are a choral director or organist based in other parts of Britain and you run a professional choir or use professional singers, I'd love to hear from you. And please tell the pro singers in your area about DepList. Yes, DepList will probably always remain London-based, because that's where there are the most job opportunities, but there's no reason why other regions shouldn't use the system too.

Away 28 Nov until 3 Dec

I will be away between 28th November and 3rd December and will not be answering queries or dealing with admin during that time. The messaging service will function as normal. External advertising may be slightly delayed but should be forwarded within 24 hours as I will be checking my emails at least once a day.

Forms Are Working Again

Our forms are working now. Read about what happened here.

I wouldn't have noticed that the Jotform service had gone down, if it weren't for an Associate Member who sent me a letter (yes, on paper — in an envelope — with a first-class stamp on it!!), telling me that our site wasn't working, and would I please send out his urgent advert. I've now added our email address to our contact page (I'd removed it when I put up the form, thinking an email link would be less convenient than the instantly fillable form), but it's good to know that snail mail still has its uses. And I've also learned that forms are not entirely reliable as a means of communication; emails are still needed as backup.

Form server is down

Jotform, the service we use for our online forms has not worked properly for a couple of days. The Jotform team is working to resolve the problems. Please would any user who is having problems accessing our forms try the following.

(1) Look at the address in your browser bar. You will see something like this:
http://www.jotform.com/form/123456789

(2) Change the com to net so that it now looks like this:
http://www.jotform.net/form/123456789

It will still be slow, but at least it should eventually show up. If that fails, you can email me here with your urgent adverts. For other types of forms, try again tomorrow!

Stats

From now on I shall try to post monthly stats of the number of adverts that go through DepList. I may also include end-of-week updates on Twitter. This year's total number of adverts so far is roughly 255.

DepForMe

Amazingly, it's taken eleven years for another online singers' depping service to come into being in the UK. DepForMe has found a way of using Twitter to do what we do with email messaging. Theirs is a free and unrestricted service, and DepList members who use Twitter may like to become followers.

However, I have no plans to add a Twitter option to our own messaging service. A protected Twitter account can't do what we want without retweets. We'd need a protected account in which approved followers (i.e. DepList Members) could tweet/retweet to their fellow followers only, and that doesn't seem to be something that's possible within the Twitter model. Our members don't generally want to advertise jobs outside our membership, so a protected account would be essential for us. Quality control and a regulated, approved membership are part of what makes us different and attractive to our users. We have over the years developed quite complicated systems to ensure that only those who are sufficiently skilled and experienced should be allowed to join (and remain on) DepList. In an ideal world, everyone who wanted to join DepList would be admitted and we would never have to remove people from our List. But depping is a multi-skilled pursuit, and not everyone has all the requisite skills and experience. Employing an untried and untested dep is a risk. It's the minimisation of those risks that users of our services are prepared to pay for.

But it's good to be reminded of Twitter's usefulness as a marketing tool.

Founder Members

It's always nice when someone rejoins DepList. Today one of our founder members rejoined after an absence of several years, which had me wondering how many of these pioneers we still have on the List. I suspect it's no more than a handful. The membership tends to be pretty constant in terms of numbers, which means that newcomers join at the same rate as people leave. Some of our current members would have been 11 or 12 years old when DepList started life! I'm not even sure when DepList was born. All I remember is that it was launched as a messaging service, called "Deputies", sometime in 1999. We compiled a list of about fifty potential members and invited them to join, and about half of those took up the offer. I made the first version of the website a few months later, and the domain name "DepList.co.uk" was registered in 2000, because "Deputies" was already taken. (What a good thing, as DepList is so much better!). How strange to think that mobile phones were not in common use back then, and the standard way of booking deps was landlines and answering machines!

If you think you are a Founder Member, please let me know using one of the contact forms on the website, so that I can make a note of it.

Easter Bookings

Have you booked your singers and organists for Easter? Our members are likely to be busy over the Easter period, so if you have not yet fixed all your Holy Week services, book now to avoid disappointment.

Profile Pics in the Members' Area

Members can now upload a profile portrait and create picture and audio albums on their profile pages. I've also added an events calendar, to which anyone can contribute.

Forum Added

The Members' Area has a working Forum now. (Still no profile pics and other uploads, though. I'll chase this up next week.)

Advertising Rates

Advertisers should note that, as from 1 February 2011, our rates have increased to £2 per advert. The rate for Full Membership and Associate Membership has not changed and stands at £10 per year. Both types of Membership are now charged on the basis of recurrent subscriptions, which are automatically renewed at the end of each year unless the member terminates their subscription.

Members' Area Officially Open

The Members' Area is now formally open. I will announce here when the photo/audio uploading facility will be in place. It's beyond my control, as the software developers need to change something on our server to get it to work.

Second Stage Completed

Search engines for the Member listings are now in place and seem to be working. Everything else is functioning more or less correctly, after much trial and error — except for the profile portraits and other uploads.