Musicnotes.com Revolutionizes Distribution And Versatility Of Sheet Music

Market Wire, February, 2000

What the Internet has done for book buying, Musicnotes.com now does for sheet musicand thats just for starters. Through its World Wide Web site, www.musicnotes.com, the Wisconsin-based market innovator not only provides instant access to thousands of sheet music selections, but also lets users hear music samples online and interact digitally with the titles theyve purchased.

Were very excited to be in the forefront of this emerging industry, states Patricia Joseph, president of Musicnotes.com. It wont be long before most sheet music is distributed electronically. Sheet music is a billion-dollar global business, and Musicnotes.com carries more than 200,000 of the worlds most popular and interesting titles from established music publishers.

In January, the online edition of USA Today featured Musicnotes.com in the Tech Sections Hot Sites list. Selections to the list are based on editors impressions of their content and appearance. Musicnotes.com also drew a mention in the print USA Todays New and Notable rundown on January 20.

From any personal computer, a Musicnotes.com user can search for music based on the composer, artist, title, keywords or other criteriaeven snippets of lyrics. Purchased selections download in as little as four seconds, far outpacing other music sources.

This paradigm shift in the publishing industry is powered by Musicnotes.coms proprietary technology: it features a powerful search engine, and a unique system for viewing and interacting with multimedia sheet music using plug-in technology and an interactive player.

The Musicnotes.com plug-in automatically downloads in less than 30 seconds and permits the user to quickly and easily download thousands of free samples of sheet music via the Internet to their home computer. The website allows the user to see, hear, and print each sample as part of the shopping experience. Customers can then purchase the entire file using a secure online commerce engine.

Afree, multimedia music player enhances the shopping experience by allowing the consumer to interact with a selected piece of music. It allows the user to follow many of his or her favorite recordings, synchronized note-for-note with either a MIDI performance or a real performance playing from a CD. The music notation and lyrics light up in time with the music, and the user can change the speed of the piece in order to practice at any pace. As an educational aid, every symbol on the music page is linked to a music encyclopedia so that a user can select a symbol, such as a guitar bend, to hear it or learn how to play it.

The sites initial library includes more than 8,000 pieces of digital sheet music from Warner Bros. Publications and Mel Bay Publications, with many titles from other publishers now in production. If a customer finds that a song is not yet available in digital form, it can usually be found among the almost 200,000 traditional printed music titles available on the website. These titles represent music from all of the major music publishers such as Warner Bros., Hal Leonard, and Alfred Publishing Co., as well as specialty music from smaller niche publishers.

Asophisticated search engine allows the user to locate a specific selection by title, lyric, composer, keyword, arranger, artist/group, or by instrument. Kathleen Marsh, vice-president of Musicnotes.com, states, Our goal ultimately is to have the worlds most popular and interesting music digitized, catalogued and instantly available to every music maker that has access to the Internet.

The foundation technology for Musicnotes.com was developed over the past 18 years by Musicnotes.coms head of music software, Thomas Hall. While teaching at Princeton University, Hall created MusE, an electronic music engraving system that became the base technology for Musicnotes.com. In a pivotal development two years ago, Hall and co-founder Walter Burt created technology that was able to compress the digital files, including all the multimedia data that makes the music interactive, to a size that could be delivered rapidly over the Internet. Hall states, We can make the music come alive and still have files small enough so that website viewing is instantaneous.

Music editions produced using MusE have won dozens of the Music Publishers Association Paul Revere awards, a highly coveted distinction that honors graphic excellence in music setting. Eight years ago, Warner Bros. licensed the use of MusE for producing their music editions, and has created more than 40,000 pieces of music using the MusE technology.

As a spin-off from an established music publisher, Musicnotes.com has close contacts in the music publishing world and understands the critical role that copyright protection plays in the success of a music publisher. We have a strong respect for the value of a copyright, remarks Marsh. The technology that Tom and Walter developed has secure safeguards built-in through encryption codes, guaranteeing that all royalties will be paid directly to the appropriate people, both the creators and publishers of these pieces.