Quote: "The song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads." D&C 25:12

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The idea for this site was born in 2010, when I (Melissa Pack) wanted to publish a song online, but didn't know where.  At first I thought of creating an individual webpage for myself like many other Mormon composers out there (we've found over 100 such sites thus far).

Then we realized that it is much harder to publish your own website, and be able to get people to visit it, since there are so many out there.

With my husband's help, however, I came to realize that there may be more people like me out there, who would benefit from some centralized location for publication.  Especially those looking for specific arrangements of specific songs, there was no easy way to find all the (free) options out there, not even google was enough, really.

There are also a lot of people looking for LDS sheet music out there (especially of the free variety).  Before we started, this mainly consisted of perusing Sally Deford's (most excellent) website, and we wanted to create a resource that would allow them to find "all of the other" music out there, so they could open their ability to find more pieces.

As the site has evolved our scope has changed a little from the original, but our goal is still to connect as many Mormon composers (especially less known ones) with as many Mormon musicians that use their music (ex. ward choir leaders, soloists, etc.) as possible.

Initially we had some support from some awesome composers who allowed us to publish their pieces, like Sally Deford, Lindy kerby, and Linda Pratt, and others, who were very supportive of our idea and let their pieces be added to our site.  After that we went and searched out other composers who had published themselves online, asking them if we could add them to their database, and the site has blossomed to its current state (75 composers, 2500+ songs, over 3M page views).

It started with only a few visitors a day, like maybe 30 or 40, and has blossomed to something like 500 on weekdays, close to 1000 on Sundays.  Currently (2/2014) in the last 30 days we've had visitors from 124 countries, so this has grown to be much larger than just an "LDS" thing, apparently.

So the question is, was our initial goal of being able to publish my wife (Melissa Pack) successful?  Well, according to our statistics, she's had 4860 views of her song on our site, and 700'ish pdf downloads, and we consider that to be pretty  successful (as well as us allowing all the other composers on our site to be successful as well).  we even had one person write in and say to us "thank you for such and such a song, we've really liked singing it" which is nice.  The site ranks high for google searches such as "free lds sheet music" and "lds sheet music arrangements" and "lds cello sheet music" (as well as many others).  We feel that we've re-shaped the Internet as far as LDS pieces go, and changed how many choir leaders do their sheet music searching [1], we're slowly re-shaping the LDS sheet music world.

Now we're the biggest collection of LDS sheet music on the web (2600 pieces and counting), and we're not looking to slow down [2].


Already mentioned, but the site is (initially) a way for the "little
guys" to publish their music in front of an audience at all, since the
barrier to entry for becoming google friendly is too high for the
little guys, since they're unknown, and don't show up high in the
search results, so nobody will ever find them unless they're part of a
privileged few (Sally Deford, the church's site, a very few others).

(As my wife would say, she wanted to publish but I convinced her she'd
need more songs than just hers on the site, for anybody to even go
there at all LOL)
Anyway it probably doesn't make too much sense, but something like
that (and I think you already had the gist of it anyway from our
discussion).

So it "started out" as being for my wife to publish, but has since
grown to be more of a community central point for publishers and
seekers of music.


Random links:

The source for the site is open source, at https://github.com/rdp/freeldssheetmusic.org You can also "contact us" with any thoughts/ideas/feature requests for our website, they're much appreciated.

We also provide access to the site viewing analytics to the site for anyone interested--they're fascinating.

If you want access to/a copy of our song in database format, For free!

A few links for my own benefit:

Here is a list of songs most recently added to our lists.

List of arrangements published only on this site :)

 You can see arrangement popularities (songs listed with their respective popularity) here.

[1] http://www.musicbyandrew.ca/sources.html "the first place I check"

[2] Jackman music (a large "for pay" sheet music publisher) has 1800 by their count.