I am moved to briefly comment on my own site after hitting a record 1207 hits yesterday.
There are usually 700-1000 hits a day looking for information on liturgical music and it is very seasonal – for example “As I Have Done For You” has been briefly top on the hit parade for Holy Thursday. From previous communication it seems that a music leader tells everyone to sing along with the backing at home until they get it right, to reduce practice times at church.
The stats show a lot of people linking on to AOV, OCP, GIA, WLP, Litmus, Hope Publishing etc etc and it is to be hoped that they find the sheet music they are looking for there.
I am very grateful to the people in their parishes who send in what they are are playing or hearing in their parishes. I have never played in a church where organ music was the standard, so hearing selections from parishes who have that option is a learning experience for me. I apologise for the fake organ backings, but they are meant as a way for me to learn what a song sounds like, rather than a backing that would be used in church.
AOV, for their hard work, rightly dominate the scene in Australia, so there is also a gap of US songs published after AOV 1&2 that have little penetration into the Australian market, because we have nothing like the continuous review of songs that is seen from OCP for example. Hearing of new songs being used in parishes suggests at least that they are worth investigating.
I hope that the backings continue to help people like me, who can perhaps strum a guitar but can’t sight read music, to learn how the songs go and so broaden their palate for liturgy in their churches.
I currently play about twice a month in a small, friendly parish with amazingly talented volunteers (they can sight read!) and it is coordinated by an overqualified volunteer who keeps us organised and also plays at mass herself. She also runs the meetings where a few of us pick the music to match the upcoming liturgies and decide whether to try to get the assembly to learn a new song. The assembly loves to sing but can be slow with anything unfamiliar. They have really taken to singing the Psalm response over the last couple of years, which is great.
Best wishes
Geoffrey Madden
Interesting. My visits are also seasonal, but two big times are St Patrick’s Day (all-time record of 1651 visits this year, and also around St Brigid’s Day: “We Sing a Song to Brigid” is a big-time hit among the primary school set in Ireland, and their teachers.
Probably similar patterns apart from that: I’ve been getting 500-700 visits/day for most of the last year, with the occasional seasonal spike.
My original plan was to put up the listing of (slightly obscure) hymn books, and see from the search traffic what people were looking for but not finding elsewhere – but Google scuppered that when they removed most of the searched-for data from their analytics. But the hymn-requests form get about 30 entries a month, and these are the source of most new items I’m posting now.
Happy Easter!