Merry Xmas – Are we really taking the Christ out of Christmas?

By Marie@Musicademy | December 14, 2011

We asked an innocent little question on Facebook today: “Can anyone tell us why North Americans use the term Happy Holidays rather than Happy Christmas? And what do you think about that?” The whole “Happy Holidays” thing sounds really strange to us in the UK, but that’s probably because we don’t have the same run […]

Facebook competition result

By Marie@Musicademy | November 21, 2011

The nice people at Fangager have done a scan of our Facebook page to help us identify our “most engaged fan” in the month leading up to the date we hit 2,000 fans. You can see that Kathleen Trissel is the clear winner having posted multiple videos, quotes and links as well as receiving comments […]

Fans are vanity. Engagement is sanity.

By Marie@Musicademy | October 21, 2011

You may have noticed that in recent weeks we’ve been working a lot harder at our presence on Facebook. It makes sense to be on a platform where people feel at home and offer them the option of daily updates to their wall rather than a bunch of posts emailed to them each week. With […]

Is a church website enough? What about the social media revolution?

By Marie@Musicademy | September 28, 2011

When I’m not working at Musicademy I lecture part time in marketing with a particular interest in social media. I recently wrote an article for one of the UK’s leading digital marketing websites, Smart Insights, and was surprised by how many Christians commented to me about its relevance for churches as they seek to communicate […]

Top 30 backing tracks

By Marie@Musicademy | September 14, 2011

With the launch of our MultiTrack player, we’ve had an insight into which songs are most popular right now. Of course, that’s also CCLI’s job and our top downloads chart closely reflects the CCLI top 100.   CLICK HERE  to access our Song List where these and all our tracks are available. Here are our […]

How are music lessons approached in your church? Are musicians encouraged to use the building to teach?

By Marie@Musicademy | September 6, 2011

Can you use your church building to teach music classes? One of our regular contributors and guest bloggers asked us recently to pose a Friday Facebook Question that he was keen to get some opinion on. This was: “How are music lessons approached in your church? Are musicians encouraged to use the building to teach?” […]

Practical help for band rehearsals – part 5

By Guest Blogger | August 30, 2011

Practice is personal. Rehearsal is relational. We’ve been focusing on the practice side of the coin, so let’s  flip it and talk about rehearsals. Unfortunately the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to making rehearsals “relational” is the dreaded team devotional. OK, maybe yours are great. But for the rest of us, […]

Backgrounds behind song words – yes or no?

By Guest Blogger | July 20, 2011

I was delighted to find the post below on Jamie Brown’s excellent blog. It reminded me of a discussion we had here way back about the usefulness of images behind words in worship. Its a particularly pertinent post for us as we’re about to launch our some new Worship Backing Band products which will include […]