You would think that in the world we live today, getting ahold of sheet music for some of your favorite songs online wouldn’t be that big of a deal. I mean, just poke your nose into enough dark corners of the internet and eventually what you’re looking for reveal itself. Right? There seem to be plenty of people getting along just fine using that approach for music, movies, TV shows, software, and even e-books now. But you would be surprised how difficult it is to find freely available sheet music, let alone the legal kind.
So what’s a music aficionado supposed to do? Well, I happened to stumble upon a site today that does sheet music right, worshipmusic.com. Sure, it’s a highly specialized target audience, but read this: I was able to buy a digital lead sheet for a song I’ll be playing in a few days for just $2.50. Yeah, two dollars and fifty cents. A nice and simple process too. The standard shopping cart, checkout fare, but then I instantly received a download link via email for the pdf. Not any of those crazy proprietary plugins that tend to cause Firefox crashes, but nice simple pdfs. Exactly what everybody wants. I had a great experience and worshipmusic.com, and would have bought several more songs if they would have had them available for digital download.
Maybe I want everything my way, but it still wasn’t good enough. If I can get a song for $0.99 on iTunes, why should it cost $2.50 for the sheet music? And especially since I’m just downloading a file. You can’t even plead printing, shipping, and distribution costs on that one, buddy. The two and a half bucks was a low enough price point for me on this one-time purchase, but it’d probably need to be closer to the buck-a-pop range that iTunes has gotten. The selection is also extremely limited. Out of six songs I was looking for, they only had one. Browsing was a bit difficult as well. With long lists of items and not much effort put into usability, particularly categorizing the catalog, it took a while to figure out that they even had that song.
So what would the perfect sheet music store look like for me? Probably a lot like Amazon.com‘s mp3 downloads, but with pdf files instead of mp3. It’s a clean store, easy to find things. The download process is simple, and gives you exactly what you wanted: that file quickly, easily, and legally. If old media is to not get run over by turning public opinion regarding file sharing, they’ve got to fight with products, not lawsuits. And this sort of product is exactly what I’m looking for.
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