It’s advertised everywhere.  "The best free sheet music site", "Download free sheet music here".  If you run a Google search for free sheet music, you are likely to come up with hundreds of thousands of sites that offer it.  With all the "free sheet music" available, you might think that it would drive music publishing companies out of business.

Isn’t that the pattern we saw with pirated mp3 downloads?  Records shops around the world closed down, but perhaps that was due to tangible media moving into digital form.  There aren’t many people purchasing vinyl records today.  Even CDs are giving way to iPods and media devices that can store more music than many home computers.

Now that sheet music is making it’s own technological advances, it has become quick and easy to download your favorite copyright music from legal websites.  So why doesn’t this digital form follow the same trend? There are many reasons.  Anyone who has tried a file sharing program might have noticed that every title is legit.  In many cases files are disguised as computer viruses to capture information that is stored on computers.  And if it is not a virus, you may not get what you were looking for.  Popular titles are often used to share files that are completely unrelated.  To prove that case, a story comes to mind in which a hard core pornographic film was played at an elementary school in New York. The kids thought they were gearing up to watch "Camp Rock" featuring the Jonas brothers, a movie that was downloaded from a file sharing program.  Instead they received Jenna Jameson, a porn star, doing what she does best.  It took the teachers nearly 5 minutes to turn it off as they scrambled frantically telling the kids to close their eyes.  Finally someone had the sense to just pull the cord.

With all the websites online that advertise free sheet music, it almost makes no sense to look for it through file sharing applications.  Also, it is much more of a cumbersome task to provide copyright protected music into file sharing programs.  Who really wants to sit at their scanner, and go through scores page by page to share a piece that nobody is searching for.  And to follow that up,  those who do purchase sheet music, buy it for personal reasons.  It is simply not a product that they are excited to share.  Let’s face it everyone can listen to music, but how many of your friends can perform it? Meanwhile, videos and CDs are easily transmitted, and sought after by everyone who enjoys listening. 

So what is with all the free sheet music websites that are found online?  If it is really free, what is keeping the publishing companies from going out of business?  To answer that question, we need to first address the motivation behind it.  Many of these "free sheet music" websites are out-performing the real deal.  Even Music Forte’s sheet music department, which carries the entire catalog of Hal Leonard (the world’s largest sheet music publishing company) struggles with search engine ranking.  In fact, unless you are searching for a specific title, or searching from a product driven site, where every product has a price, musicians might not ever find the real deal.

Pianofiles appears to be trying to skirt copyright law by not offering any actual downloads on the site itself, but instead works as a trading community, where users can trade their sheet music with each other.  As for the files that are traded, it is unclear as to if they are ever hosted on the Pianofiles site.  Of course, their terms require that people don’t share copyright-protected material and they have the standard “file a legal claim and we’ll take it down” system that has become the de-facto standard online.

IPTheives.com

Everyone likes something for free.  In fact, "free" is one the most sought after keywords in Google’s search engine.  Even porn (another popular keyword) is advertised as free in order to take profit from this deceiving keyword.  In almost all cases, we’ve learned over time that nothing is free.

In the sheet music industry, it is no different.  Much like MySpace, many of these sites are completely ad-driven.  It is no wonder, that webmasters spend so much time building and optimizing their sites to perform at the top of SERPs (search engine result pages).  The more traffic they receive, the more ad money they can bring in.

Even so, the question of "what is the catch?" has not yet been addressed.  As obtrusive as ad-driven sites may be, we’re becoming more and more programmed to simply ignore the ads.  But even beyond the attempts to lure website visitors away for some advertising revenue, there is an imperfect product.

For a very amateur musician, this might be fine. If their skill level is not very high, and their ear is not trained for music, they will be very unlikely to notice the flaws that exist.  The fact of the matter is, either the music is in public domain, or it has been scribbled down with so many errors that an attempt to perform would be humiliating at the least.

Let’s go back to public domain music; I’m afraid I might have lost some of our readers with the term. Public domain refers to music that is no longer under copyright protection.  So unless you are seeking The Statler Brothers, or Japan’s answer to the Beatles, "The Spiders’, it is very unlikely that you will find anything that was once published and transcribed correctly.  Even after tunes become less popular, they almost always have their copyright renewed, and then included in music compilation books.

At most, you may find 4 or 5 pieces of sheet music that is illegal for any kind of distribution.  But before you ever get there, you are more likely to find that it is not free after all.  And if you don’t you will surely find viruses, pop-ups of webpages you aren’t interested in, or the latest scam in online pyramid schemes, proving once again, there is almost always a catch.

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