Music Sheet Selling

• Jul 1, 2022 - 21:25

I made an arrangement of Pirates of the Caribbean and was wondering how I could sell it. Does MuseScore support music sheet sales?

Comments

• Jul 1, 2022 - 21:26

No. Not here on musescore.org at all, but also not over on the sheet music sharing site musescore.com.
And certainly not for copyrighted music (like Pirates of the Caribbean), as selling that would be stricly illegal

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• Jul 1, 2022 - 22:05

If you have no explicit written consent from the copyright holder of the original, then yes, selling an arrangement is illegal as well.
You always need approval from the original copyright holder to be able to (re-)distribute the work and/or it's derivatives.

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• Feb 2, 2025 - 14:13

If it’s true MuseScore “doesn’t handle sales of any kind “, then why are there so many scores on the site that require I pay for them despite having paid an annual subscription?

Secondly, for the charts that require a payment (even though there are no sales of any kind), who does that money go to when I purchase one?

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• Feb 2, 2025 - 14:37

The website didn’t do sales three years ago, but things have changed now that Muse Group owns Hal Leonard. Now, selected scores published by HL - scores never available on MuseScore.com at all in the past - are made available for purchase. Presumably, revenue from those sales goes to HL and then they share with the composer / copyright owner according to whatever agreement they have.

For scores accessed via subscription - user arrangements of music from other publishers - that revenue goes directly to the respective publishers, who also share with the original composer / current copyright owner according according to whatever agreement they have in place.

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• Feb 2, 2025 - 19:41

Yours and mine is not a topic for musescore.org, but for musescore.com.
Having said that, we here at .org too often find ourselves offering sympathy when folk get snookered by some of the tomfoolery that occurs at .com... ;-)

Check this out:
https://musescore.com/user/90398272/scores/21700090
Here's what I see today at that link:
price 2.png
It says: Buy this score for $2.49. Look at that score! :-0

.

That's actually good news because the price has been dropped. It was $3.99 this past November!!
price 1.png
I think I'll wait for a further price reduction for such a quality score. Can't wait to download and play it!
ROFL!

Disclaimer: I am not a Pro member. You, as a Pro+ member, may be able to pay more money to get additional products/subscriptions. Just be sure to cancel well in advance of any unwanted automatic renewals.

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• Feb 2, 2025 - 22:18

The problem with this score is that it is misidentified in the database. There are probably multiple entries for that song, some marked PD but others not because they are associated with arrangements from a licensed publisher. So you need to go and fix the entry (click “…”, update score, and select the correct entry from the dropdown). That happens from time to time if one isn’t careful to select the right variant when uploading.

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• Feb 3, 2025 - 16:22

Perfect, thanks.
Pretty annoying when you publish something that should be free but have no way to check yourself whether it really is and need others to tell you that musescore.com is trying to make money with it.

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• Feb 3, 2025 - 16:31

I created a free account using an email alias, and I log into that in an I cognitive window in Chrome when I want to check how some things works for free accounts. But also, you can generally check and fix the status yourself as you did - the text is just extra peace of mind.

When uploading a piece that is not original, often there are multiple listings for it because of slight variations in the spelling of the title or whatever. Be sure to choose one explicitly identified as PD if there is one. But sometimes none are already identified as such and you need to go through the extra step of declaring it PD.

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• Feb 3, 2025 - 19:27

> ...and need others to tell you that musescore.com is trying to make money with it. <

For this one...
buy-score.png
...the score info. states:
"Published by permission of the arranger, who arranged the original Piano piece for String Quartett."

So, does that mean you received permission from the arranger to charge $2.49, or did .com receive permission to charge?
(Most scores don't even mention "permission".)

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• Feb 5, 2025 - 11:08

I hope to have it fixed now, for Prelude I and Prelude II, as far as I can tell Prelude III was 'correctly' setup already

As per the statistics none of my 4 public scores have ever been downloaded before those changes, not sure I can trust that though, whether 'commercial' downloads count there.

I do (now again) know why I don't/won't publish any of my other 870+ scores...
(besides the difficulty to determine which of them are PD or Original Work and which are under copyright)

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• Feb 5, 2025 - 16:17

Yes, no nag screens about needing any payment or subscription.
Point of interest:
I downloaded the 3 Preludes. When the first came up as "This file was last saved in MuseScore 3.6.2", I dragged the lot of them from my download folder into Mu3 and they opened instantaneously (using those wonderful separate tabs).
Of course, they also open in Mu4 (one at a time in separate instances).
BTW: I believe O_Come_O_Come_Emmanuel never had a paywall.

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