Over the last six months Sound and Music has noticed a sharp increase in the number of composers signing up to become a part of the British Music Collection. This is incredibly exciting and bring us ever closer to our goal of transforming it into a living archive, and a brilliant new platform for the discovery of new music. Right now, the site is still in beta, but a brand-new, much more beautiful, modern and user friendly one is soon to be launched in July. So, now is a pretty good time to sign up, if you haven’t done so already!

If you are a composer and interested in signing up, please find details of our acquisitions policy here and check that you are eligible (essentially, you just need to be a member of PRS and either predominantly live or work in the UK): http://thecollection.soundandmusic.org/article/british-music-collection…

If you meet the criteria, please contact us to create a profile, on thecollection@soundandmusic.org and we will send you your username and password, as well as a link to your page for you to edit.

Here is a step-by-step guide to making the most out of your profile:

• Once logged in, and on your profile page, click ‘edit’.

• Add your biog and photo – self explanatory!

• Add your works list, listing as many works as you like, including their instrumentation, and duration.

• Embeds: Make the most out of the ability to embed media using Soundcloud, Vimeo and Youtube. This brings your profile to life and creates a way for visitors to immediately discover your work. You can embed content both for individual pieces in your workslist and also your main profile page – definitely recommended for any sound or video you would like to make prominent.

• Scores: If your work is score-based, please do add scores. This has long been a focus of the Collection and is what a lot of visitors will come looking for. We have some clear disclaimers in the terms and conditions section about how these are not for performance or commercial use but rather for research. If copyright is a concern, we recommend either watermarking or truncating your scores in some way before uploading them.

• Additional documentation: In this section you might want to add: additional photos of yourself or performances; programme notes; letters; ticket stubs, etc. Again, this helps your profile become a really exciting place for discovery.

• Freetagging: Please enter tags which you feel represents your work at the bottom of the page where prompted. This can be anything you like, but it is really a case of the more the merrier – and the more likely your profile is to be stumbled upon accidentally by interested users. All tags should be separated by a comma. For example, this could be ‘experimental’, ‘piano’, ‘Edinburgh’, ‘graphic score’, ‘synth’, ‘community’, ‘collaboration’, ‘Cafe OTO’, ‘Royal Academy of Music’, ‘improvisation’, ‘noise’ – really anything. All these tags then link together in order to allow the user a new way of discovering the collection. (So they will then be linked to everybody else whose profile is tagged with the word ‘graphic score’, for example).

If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, please get in touch on thecollection@soundandmusic.org.