Download piano sheet music online for free and legally

Piano notes have long been available not only in the music business. There is also a huge selection online. Unfortunately, only a few websites offer piano sheet music free and legally. We explain why and help you find legal free piano sheet music.

The legal situation

Music has an international minimum copyright protection. The German Copyright Act applies in Germany. It not only protects music, but also any intellectual property that has the character of a work, including notes and texts. Offers that only refer to notes from third-party websites - in particular file hosters - are very definitely a copyright infringement. There are two circumstances under which piano sheet music can be offered online for free:

1. The provider is in possession of the copyright or publishing rights of the works.
2. The work must be in the public domain, meaning that the author is either unknown or has been dead for over 70 years. Public domain is better known as the public domain. In addition, the sheet music shown must not violate any copyrights or ancillary copyright, which means that copies of public domain notes from a protected volume of music are also illegal - because they are protected as so-called "small coins".

Piano sheet music free and legal on the Internet

The legal situation apparently excludes free piano sheet music on the Internet. Because publishers and musicians earn their money by selling sheet music. Not being allowed to copy public domain music, but having to set it yourself, does a lot of work. Nevertheless, there are some online archives for free sheet music:

1. On GreatJSBach you will find a large part of the Bach catalog raisonné for free download.
2. The digital Mozart Edition contains many Mozart notes for private study purposes.
3. The Mutopia project has taken on the task of creating sheet music for public domain works.
4. You can find an even larger selection at Kreusch.

Piano notes as an interactive game

The Semantic Audio Department of Fraunhofer, the inventors of the MP3 format, has developed an interactive music game. It's called Songs2See and recognizes the notes from your MP3 collection. This is available on a sheet of music and a keyboard and filters out the melody part if you wish so that you can practice on the original song.

• The game is in flash format. A demo and a paid full version can be found here.
• Unfortunately, the program weakens especially with polyphonic melodies and full, unnatural sounds, as is common in pop music.

You are also legally on the safe side when you output midi files of public domain works in note form with note editors such as Finale NotePad 2012 or MuseScore.