Sheet music and music books are easier to find than ever, thanks to many online retailers. For working musicians, big fat “fake books” containing main scores (i.e. simplified sheet music stripped down to the essentials) remain popular.
You might ask, “Ink and paper sheet music? — In this day and age, with this and that all digital?”
Yes. People still buy sheets of paper with musical notes printed on them, to learn and memorize, and especially to play for their own pleasure and satisfaction. Hobbyist musicians buy sheet music to play. Music students buy sheet music to learn from teachers. They look for sheet music for popular songs and classical solo pieces.
Unfortunately, Not all songs are published in sheet music form. Some songs you hear on an album aren’t chosen by its publisher to justify the expense of creating sheet music for it.
Also, even if a song has been published, songs have a kind of shelf life, where the sheet music is available for a while, but the publisher doesn’t replenish their supply. If you don’t buy the sheet music within the first year or two, you may never get the chance.
At some point, the demand for a song sheet becomes so low that retailers have no incentive to keep sheet music in stock that is no longer in demand. When this happens, the song is technically “out of print”.
But that raises an interesting question:
Q. How do you find sheet music that is no longer in print or has never been in print?
Q. How would you find a “hard to find” song?
The simple solution is easy advice to give because it’s three little words: “Find the publisher.” But that simple solution is not easily realized.
The steps to find the publisher are easy. But just because the steps are easy, that doesn’t mean success. Your chances of a publisher responding to your letter or phone call with an actual solution are low.
However, despite the high odds for success, there are three basic steps you can take to at least give it a try. Listed below are the steps I recommend you follow.
Step #1: Find the right song among all those songs with the same title.
Beware: Song titles are not copyrighted, according to the United States Copyright Office. Therefore, there will be countless songs with identical titles. So if your favorite song is titled something like “Sunday Morning” or “My Girl” then you will have to search through countless songs by other writers, other publishers, and other recording artists, to find the right song from the right person(s).
Step #2: Look up the song title in the databases of all performing rights organizations.
Lucky for you, all released songs that are still protected by copyright are probably registered somewhere in a database maintained by one of the organizations responsible for raising money on behalf of songwriters. Such organizations are called “performing rights organizations”. In the United States, the two largest performing rights organizations are ASCAP and BMIbeing the smallest SESAC. They all have online search engines that list the songs they are responsible for. If you know who wrote the song you’re interested in and have the exact title, you’ll eventually find the right entry in the database, even if you have to skip 10 or 20 songs with the exact same title. But until you look, you won’t know if your song is under the control of ASCAP or BMI or SESAC.
Step #3: When you find the right song in the database, write down the publisher’s name and address.
Your task is almost complete. You will need to contact the publisher and ask them how to get the sheet music for your song. Writing a letter the old-fashioned way is probably your best bet, as you’ll enlist the help of the US Postal Service to send your letter to the right address or company.
I cannot wish for customer service from any given publisher. They may respond quickly or not at all. They may have access to email for their customer service department, or they may be next to impossible to contact.
Be careful, again: publishing houses close regularly. If your target publisher has merged with another company or filed for bankruptcy, then your task of reaching out to a sympathetic person at the right publisher is low. This is another reason to write a letter instead of calling or sending an email. — You get help from the USPS to go a step further than you could on your own. A name change, or a change of headquarters, can cause your hounds to lose track of a promising trail.
That last step of “contact the editor” completes the process. It’s that easy.
Now, you are at the mercy of the Fates if your letter will make it to the right address and hit the right part. Even then, if the right party doesn’t have the budget or resources to support their clients or support the fans of the artist in question, they’re out of luck. Remember, small publishers don’t have the budget for any personalized customer service. They tend to just sit back and collect royalties, and aren’t interested in one more sale, here and there, every other week. They just don’t have the staff for any kind of personalized service. There’s no profit in selling your modest inventory one song at a time.
On the other hand, since countless small publishers have management relationships with the large publishers, there is a chance that your letter will find its way to the big company, which in turn runs hundreds of small publishers. The big publisher can point you in the right direction, such as referring you to a major retail store with official ties to that big publisher.
In short: although your chances of getting out of print sheet music of your favorite song are low, the steps you can take are as easy to do that you might as well take the risk and invest the time of an online search and invest the cost of a postage stamp and mailing your letter. At the very least, you can send a quick email and see what happens. You might even get lucky and contact a knowledgeable representative who has the right contacts.
And who knows? If enough people write that letter, then the publisher might think, “Hey, there’s a market demand for this song. Let’s take advantage of this surge of interest and print one more print run and ride this wave of popularity to the bank.”
And you will celebrate by sitting down with your guitar or piano and playing your new sheet music.