Dear all,



Today we’d like to share important news with you concerning MuseScore.

Ten years ago we (Werner, Nicolas and Thomas) started working on MuseScore with the mission to democratise access to sheet music. The plan came in two steps. First by developing free music notation software for everyone, then followed by a platform to upload and share sheet music. The latter is a commercial service which sustained the development of the free and open source MuseScore music notation software.

We can fairly state that today MuseScore is the most popular notation software on the market, and by extend the world’s largest sheet music creators community. This is a great achievement which we, as an open source community, should be extremely proud of. Millions of people are learning and creating music with MuseScore every year.

That said, it’s important to also look at the other side of the medallion, a side which we didn’t much communicate about. As MuseScore has become a very large software project, on which so many users rely on for their hobby and work, keeping up with the growth has become a major challenge. Our company resources were not equally growing fast enough, and therefore the future of the MuseScore project could become uncertain.

It was always our intention to put a business model in place which could work for all stakeholders involved (creators, right holders, consumers) but we learnt that we could only achieve this by either a substantial external investment, or through a strategic partnership with a company who has established relationships with music publishers. After some time of researching both options, we opted for the latter.

In short, we have decided to let Ultimate Guitar acquire the MuseScore company. Ultimate Guitar has pioneered a successful model for working with music publishers, and all MuseScore users will be able to benefit from this. Additionally, there are more resources now to take on the next steps and turn MuseScore into the online destination for sheet music.

Of course, it is important to all of us that the open source nature of the MuseScore project is preserved. Therefore we would like to emphasize that the MuseScore notation software remains open source and that all code contributions will continue to be made under GPLv2. We are fully committed to make MuseScore 3 and all future releases happen and we will continue to make them available for free to the world.

We would like to thank everyone who has been on our journey so far and we hope to continue to work with all of you on the future of MuseScore. We also like to invite you to read the announcement by Ultimate Guitar founder Eugeny Naidenov.

Yours truly,

Werner, Nicolas, Thomas