Musicnotes Points Toward The Future In Digital Delivery Of Sheet Music

Royalty payments from print publishing rights for songs seem so insignificant that music publishers tend to overlook the potential profits from digital print rights.

So says Kathleen Marsh, CEO of Musicnotes, a Madison, Wis.-based digital sheet music publisher founded in 1998 by Tom Hall. In conjunction with A-R Editions, Hall developed the MusE music engraving system, which was used to produce the first edition of music engraved entirely on a computer. The technology, Marsh feels, offers publishers a new and substantial revenue stream that is probably being ignored but surely shouldn't be.

"Print in general is such a small portion of overall royalties relative to audio that it's considered almost a throwaway right at the 11th hour," explains Marsh. "Because it's overlooked, the opportunity that digital print delivery presents is also overlooked."

Digital print rights involve the rights to digitize musical notation and graphs (such as guitar tablature) as well as textual information (such as lyrics) in a manner in which they may be used through all means of digital delivery, such as the Internet, CDs, DVDs, and music scanners.

Some digital print rights, such as those offered by Musicnotes, include digital data representing pitch and duration, which can be obtained through midi (musical instrument digital interface) or through CDs themselves.

According to Marsh, music publishers carelessly "bundle" digital print rights along with traditional print rights. "Given the music industry's legendary protection of their copyrights as if they were the crown jewels, this is simply mind-boggling," she says. "To date, very few music publishers have comprehended that digital rights are golden and are a fundamentally different asset from traditional print rights, neither replacing nor supplanting print sales but involving an entirely new product that can be held and controlled by the publisher."

Digital sheet music publishing is more than the mere digital reproduction of sheet music, Marsh adds. Indeed, the Musicnotes site goes beyond ink on paper, with instant delivery of digitized sheet music that can be sold in various forms, such as different keys, lyrics only, and synchronized with recording.

Web site visitors can browse, search, view, and buy from a catalog of 10,000 multi-genre digital titles, with songs by everyone from George Gershwin to Garth Brooks, James Taylor, and 'N Sync. A deal last month with Warner Bros. Publishing added 26 classic Elton John songs to the mix. Musicnotes has also just closed two long-term licensing deals with BMG and Famous Music for the global digital rights to sell their sheet music.

Additionally, Musicnotes users can download and print out music notation and hear sound samples of music. By downloading the free Musicnotes Player, students can interact with a musical selection, changing the tempo in order to practice at any pace. They can also watch music notes light up on their computer screen in time with music playing from an audio CD and link with an interactive multimedia music encyclopedia.

Marsh looks ahead to future uses of the service, such as in-store kiosks, publish-on-demand, and flat-panel electronic music stands. "In the print business, the content owners have traditionally allowed the print companies to create and control the actual physical product," she says. "In the digital world, we allow our publishing partners to create archives of digital information/print so that the material they own is under their control and they have access to it for future products and whatever ways they see fit."

Future profits from the sale of both digital sheet music product and hard print goods are "enormous," continues Marsh. "There are approximately 8,000 dealers of musical instruments and products in the U.S., but only half carry any print—and maybe 100 specialize—because it's a very difficult product to stock and inventory. It's expensive, takes up a lot of space, and gets ruined when people look at it. And you need trained people to carry it. So the vast majority of print music isn't available to the public. I just got back from MIDEM, where everybody, bar none, said they couldn't buy printed product of songs they were looking for besides the top 20 hits."

Musicnotes, then, is creating a large, linked database supplying up to 90 pieces of information for each song, enabling customers to search for a tune according to title, composer, key, instrumentation, and scoring, to name a few options.

"The digital delivery of print heralds a whole new renaissance in print music," says Marsh. "There's a demand that's not being satisfied because the constraints of traditional delivery make it so difficult and expensive to sell the product, as well as grow the business. With traditional print product, even a big seller—like 5,000 copies—is still a short run that's expensive to print.

"Then you have to warehouse it, pick it, and ship it," she continues. "Then it has to be displayed and inventoried and special-ordered if it's not [in stock]. So it's all very expensive and cumbersome, but digital music publishing is a major improvement. It offers instant satisfaction and is the perfect application for the Internet, because we actually can deliver a product."

But Marsh cautions publishers against giving exclusive blanket print rights—including digital print rights—to print publishers, as has been the case traditionally.

"Previous to Internet and digital distribution, it's been a common practice to give exclusive print rights to print publishers," she notes, "and many publishers continue the practice out of habit and group digital print with traditional print rights. So we need to make publishers know to be careful and not overlook the value of digital rights, because print is a small portion of an overall deal. They must understand, too, that digital publishing is a very different business from traditional print publishing."



In Appreciation: Like Irv Lichtman, I worked at the then competing trade magazine Cash Box before coming to Billboard. I like to think I'm following in his footsteps, knowing that his shoes—and justly exalted position in the industry—are too big for mere mortals to fill.