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Download Free and For-Pay Sheet Music Online

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We live in an iTunes society. Apple, with its many innovations, introduced a couple of new concepts to the consumer world. Two of the most notable from iTunes are

1. Instant downloads of multimedia like music, TV shows, podcasts and music videos
2. Unbunded multimedia – In the old economic system, in order to obtain a favorite song, one wool have to buy the entire CD with the other less desirable tracks. Now, with iTunes, single songs may be downloaded.

There two concepts of iTunes have made their way into various other fields in consumer online shopping, including online movie rentals and online printable sheet music.

Free Online Sheet Music

Online printable sheet music has been around even before iTunes. Since the late 90s, online sheet music was mostly free and consisted of mainly classical music. This was due to the fact that probably 90% of all classical music is so ancient that the copyright expired to public domain. Two of the best resources for free classical sheet music are Music-Scores.com and The Sheet Music Archive.

For-pay Online Sheet Music

Later, after the turn of the millenium, sites sprung up offering more modern and contemporary printable sheet music. The main differences were that

• They are more contemporary. Now you can buy from the likes of Jessica Simpson, Norah Jones, Green Day, etc.
• The music scores are not free.
• The sheet music carries restrictions, the most obvious one being the limit of one print per payment.

These pay-per-print online sheet music sites have some similarities with iTunes.

• They are on-demand services.
• The sheet music can be bought individually or as a songbook (analogous to albums and tracks).
• The sheet music can be previewed. You can print/view the first page or hear a sample of the first page.

Main Sites

There are two main commercial sheet music sites:

1. Sheet Music Direct – This site is managed by the Hal Leonard music company. Obviously, most of the offerings will be limited to sheet music published by Hal Leonard.
2. Music Notes – This site has a wider selection of music. It includes scores from many different publisher including Hal Leonard. They also sell tangible sheet music to be delivered to your door similarly to Sheet Music Plus.

Most contemporary music can be found in these two sites. I generally use Music Notes because it has the widest selection. Though, if I find a Hal Leonard piece, I buy it from Sheet Music Direct because it is usually $1 cheaper.

I like to use these services because I don’t have to go to the music store or buy a songbook when I only need one song. Try shopping at one of these sites. If you can’t find what you need, you’ll just have to visit your local sheet music store or Sheet Music Plus.

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Posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Buying and Selling, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Download Free and For-Pay Sheet Music Online”

1. Squire Says:
   February 3rd, 2006 at 2:37 pm

   NIce site

2. Lincoln Jaeger Says:
   November 3rd, 2006 at 6:04 am

   Hi

   I’d like to add my website http://www.greatscores.com to your list of “For-Pay Sheet Music Online” websites.

   Kind regards

   Lincoln Jaeger
   http://www.greatscores.com

3. John Carbon Says:
   November 22nd, 2008 at 7:20 pm

   I’d also like to add my website http://www.greatscores.com to your list of “For-Pay Sheet Music Online” websites.

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