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Highest Praise and New Song
Posted on March 17th, 2009 in Faith, Worship Leadership by Fred McKinnon
Hey Ya’ll,
I want to invite you to checkout the relaunch of HighestPraise.Com – it’s still a work in progress, but go check out the new home.
A little background …
HighestPraise.Com is my oldest site – nearly 15 years old (well, it started out as an aol.com/~hpprod site – remember those? In reality, I was making a “worship website” with free songs, leadsheets, “MIDI” files (remember those?), etc., more than a dozen years ago. I sort of pioneered that online – I’m ashamed to say it, because to a large degree, it’s true … and the shame comes because for someone who pioneered that, it never really went anywhere.
The site was a big, “HTML-driven” site with hundreds of pages and with the help of Chris Moncus I’m bringing it all under the care of WordPress. None of the songwriters or worship leaders I was producing and publishing have been writing lately so the site just went stagnant the last couple of years.
In 2009, I’ve seen a fresh revival of songs, songwriters, and potential to use HPP (Highest Praise Productions, Inc.) to get original music out by “indie” artists and songwriters. Hence, the relaunch. Hence, this post. Hence, your visit.
Current Featured Song
The current featured song is written and recorded by Travis Jones at Northwest Bible Church in Dallas, TX. I didn’t produce this project but have the privilege of sharing in the publishing administration with Travis’ “Two Man Tent” music catalog. It’s called “Almighty” – and is now featured and available online at HighestPraise.Com. You can listen to the song, download the MP3, chordchart, and leave a comment about it.
Some Vision
I’ve already been talking to a few of the worship songwriters out there about HPP and my vision behind it. I’ll be sharing about it in more detail here on the blog. I am asking for your support and hoping that you will spread the word and share in the excitement. The main vision behind the publishing/administration arm of HPP is to:
1. Promote original music, primarily for personal and corporate worship, to the masses, giving the “indie, grassroots songwriter” a larger platform to have their gifts of music and song exposed to the Church worldwide.
2. To protect and collect royalties and administer licensing for these works, providing the songwriters and artists with financial compensation.
Clearly, our #1 avenue of song promotion is through the network of sites and social media here – my blog, twitter, HighestPraise.Com, and TheWorshipCommunity.Com. Through that network alone, several thousand people can be exposed to the music per day.
Some of you who are reading this are probably asking “how can I get involved”? Well, take a look at the Publishing section over at Highest Praise, or jump online and message me on Twitter. We’ll talk.
If you are in worship ministry and you read this – I hope that two things will excite you about this:
1 – the opportunity to have your songs considered
2 – the privilege of using some of the song material from your peers.
Personally, I’d love to start seeing songs like “Almighty” and other originals written by the “everyday, grass-roots” writers in the church appearing in the “Sunday Setlists” blogs each week. If this gets you fired up – twitter this post, share it with your friends, and spread the word.
For the Kingdom,
Fred
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3 Responses to “Highest Praise and New Song”
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Good stuff, Fred. Thanks for all you do for the worship community. I use to live on SSI and we still vacation there about every other year. Interesting to read your “pioneering” comments about your worship resource website. All Praise Ministries was doing that back in the early 90s. We stopped because of the illegal nature of posting other people’s music and the hassle of gaining proper permission to provide those services. Today, we’re a team of worship leaders and pastors dedicated to serving churches all over the world and helping take their worship experiences from good to great. If you ever need anything, let us know how we might help you. Blessings, brother.
Hey Jimmy,
Awesome – yeah, that would have us pioneering into this around the same time – Highest Praise started it around 1993-1994 … early 90′s, like you said, though it was an AOL account, then a “technonet” account, before we bought our own domain. Copyright issues haven’t been a problem for us because we focused on our own music.