MusicNotes plays a happy tune with 1 million sheet music downloads
The music download business may be dominated by the likes of Napster and iTunes, but MusicNotes.com is building a business with a different kind of music download: digital sheet music.
MusicNotes began selling and marketing digital versions of sheet music almost five years ago and today the number of songs and music sheets downloaded from its site is about to exceed 1 million, says Tim Reiland, chairman and chief financial officer. Downloads are becoming so popular at MusicNotes, which ranks No. 400 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, that digital sales now represent between 70% and 80% of all web sales. “A year ago we were about 50-50 with digital sales versus paper sales and three years ago downloads were around 30% of the business,” Reliand says. “We are averaging about 50,000 downloads per month.”
MusicNotes carries a library of 40,000 digital pieces of sheet music, which the retailer sells for $4.95 per download. To market its download sheet music business, MusicNotes notifies customers of newly added titles to its weekly e-mail newsletter of 170,000 opt-in subscribers.
On its web its web site, MusicNotes also lets customers click on a particular title they are interested in, view the notes and listen to a sound card that plays part of the song as a cursor moves across the notes. "It looks a bit like a player piano," Reiland says.
Customer can print downloaded music once, but they retain the electronic version on their hard drive.
Reiland, a former investment banker, believes that digital music will eventually make MusicNotes a much bigger player in its web retailing niche. “The sheet music business is a $1 billion market and we were early on to offering downloads,” he says. “Digital sales will be the key to our growth going forward.”
Reiland says MusicNotes has an advantage over competitors because the company has developed proprietary technology that enables it to quickly and easily convert digital titles into its system from its network of music publishers. The digital technology also lets MusicNotes scan and convert paper music sheets into computerized files. “When the company began in 2000 we had technology that was ready to be adapted for the Internet and e-commerce.”
With a growing download business, MusicNotes, which carries more than 200,000 sheets of music and music books in its inventory, expects 2005 web sales to be at least $4 million, Reiland says.
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