Choralplayer was initially developed in 2017 by a programmer under request by the manager of the Choralia website. An agreement was made: the license fee for using Choralplayer had to be paid through the displaying of advertisements. The associated revenues had to be directly paid by the advertisement networks to the programmer.

Soon after that, the intellectual property rights pursuant to Choraplayer were transferred from the programmer to another party. The party that received the intellectual property rights of Choralplayer set a very clear condition: no direct relationship between the owner of the intellectual property rights and the end users was allowed. Support to end users had to be provided by Choralia, and revenues from advertising had to be received from the advertisement networks only. No direct revenues to the owner of intellectual property rights from end users were allowed. End users could not pay the license fee by any other means than the displaying of advertisements, otherwise this would create a direct relationship between the owner of the intellectual property rights and the end users, and this was absolutely forbidden.

Aside the separation of roles described above, there was initially no actual separation between Choralia and Choralplayer. Choralplayer was indeed named “Choralia mp3 player”, and it was embedded in the Choralia website. Users were unable to actually identify the borderline between the service provided by Choralia and the functions provided by the player. This sometimes caused a little bit of confusion, as well as limitations because some users wanted to use the “Choralia mp3 player” with their own music files and this, at that time, was not possible.

However, thanks to feedback received from users, it became more and more clear that the “Choralia mp3 player” could also be used for other training materials than just those produced by Choralia. Therefore, in 2022 a decision was made to make Choralplayer fully autonomous with respect to Choralia, with Choralia being just one of many possible users of Choralplayer. This is described in more detail in this post.

The new arrangement, with Choralplayer and Choralia being completely autonomous, allowed to do something that was not possible (or difficult to manage) before. Users can obtain that advertisements are not displayed if they make a donation to Choralia. This is described in more detail in this post.

Nevertheless, most of the previous principles remain valid. The displaying of ads remains the natural way for end users to pay the license fee to the owner of the intellectual property rights of Choralplayer, and donations to Choralia just introduce a temporary waiver to the general rule. Support to end users remains exclusively provided by Choralia. The Choralplayer website is also managed by Choralia on behalf of the the the owner of the intellectual property rights, and the website blog combines both posts relevant to Choralia and posts relevant to Choralplayer.