Where can I find free sheet music on the internet? This is a question we get asked all the time so we’ve decided to post our answer. There are many sites claiming to have free sheet music and even have the words free-sheet-music etc in their domain name.

Here is what you need to know when searching for free sheet music on the net. The only free sheet music you will find are non copyrighted public domain titles. Generally, anything published or copyrighted before 1923 is in public domain and not owned by any person or entity. Everything after that date is copyrighted which means that it is illegal to post them on a site or give them away.

Therefore you are not going to find free piano sheet music for any popular artist like Alicia Key, Daniel Powter, James Blunt, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s phantom of the opera or Disney on the internet. The publishers whose job it is to protect the artists rights have long ago put such sites out of business and their lawyers diligently keep their eyes out for new ones that might be stupid enough to publish copyrighted works.

There are tab sites for guitar which is a grey area regarding legalities. These sites do not have official note for note transcriptions but rather the person who wrote the tab offers his ‘interpretation’ of how the song goes. For the most part these transcriptions are rarely accurate.

There are sheet music digital download sites which do offer free previews of their sheet music and some even have free sheet music for download. (Public domain titles of course). More information can be found at the Mutopia Project . There are many titles in the public domain that are available for download that are arranged by the people who upload them. However even in this case if you want a truly great arrangement, by a professional arranger, you will end up paying for it.

Hopefully this information has helped you understand why you can not find the sheet music of your favorite artist for free. As disappointing this is to many, our hope was to save you hours of fruitless searching.