Just a decade ago we were all buying expensive sheet music books in dedicated sheet music stores or, for those on tight budgets, using photocopies of library books.
While good quality books of printed scores from Henle and other quality engravers is still a nice thing to have for the most common pieces like the sets of Beethoven Sonatas or Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier the sheet music industry has undergone a dramatical change the last few years and most piano pieces one could ever need is avaiable online for instant download.
The music is then printed on a home pc printer and immediately usable at the piano.
At first the quality of scores available for download was, as in most other areas developing on the Internet, very uneven. The reason was of course that computer savy piano playing amateurs was quickly taking advantage of the new technology which made it easy to share music with anyone all over the world while the major music publishers was hardly aware of the possibilities, or at least, did not know how to make use of them.
Today the situation is different and although the big old publishing houses are still not really in the game there are some new stars on the sky in form of websites which has made it their mission to publish sheet music online.
We will post reviews of these sites here in the coming months.
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