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Why Music Notation is Free Now

(This is a cross-post from blog.noteflight.com.)

I was thinking the other day about Noteflight, and the most frequently asked question of all — so frequent, it should probably go in our FAQ: “How can you make money if your notation software is free”?

I’ll answer that question somewhat indirectly, with an observation followed by another question.

There is a constant trend in the evolution of software. Our expectations of software value received per dollar spent are constantly being raised, whether we are aware of it or not, and online use has a lot to do with it. Part of that process is a shift in perspective that I’ll summarize this way: “Yesterday’s application is tomorrow’s component.”

Let’s look at a familiar example: word processing. Way back when, there was a program called Microsoft Word. Hey, there still is — and it still ain’t cheap! But I’m talking about Word 2000 right now, not MS Office 2008. Its main toolbar looked like this at the time:

And here’s a toolbar from one of those ubiquitous online “rich text editors” that you see in your browser all the time now, everywhere from blogs to email programs to content management systems:

So, back to the original proposition: do you pay anything for an editor like this, that you use in an application whose main purpose is to do something else, that’s larger-scale and more important to you?

Of course you don’t pay for that. You unthinkingly click the “B” button to make your text bold, never giving a thought to the fact that Microsoft used to charge a steep price for functionality like that, back in the day. As you do this, you are not thinking, “wow, I’m doing word processing!” You are using the editor to write your friend an e-mail, or to create some course content for your students, or to make up a document that you are storing online in Adobe Buzzword, Google Docs, etc.

This neatly sums up what Noteflight is all about. What you should pay for isn’t the raw ability to compose and edit music notation on a computer: it’s the software around the editor that matters. Music notation software is going to be free now.

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