“I’ve always wanted to have a little Steve Jobs moment,” he quips before explaining that he’s finally found an app that allows him to play requests, off the cuff, he’s not memorised. 

This surely, was a glimpse into the future – or rather what is now, in 2014, the present. Every musician has horror stories of unwieldy music falling off the stand mid page-turn, or of turning up with the wrong score. And, bar risking the odd audience chuckle as iPad pages are turned with a swipe (as Rhodes encountered back in 2010), this 21st-century technology seems very much the solution.

Or is it? Come 2014, in fact the iPad is still not particularly ubiquitous in musical circles. And, with a global market estimated at still around $1bn at retail, sales of printed music of all genres are still apparently doing nicely.

Not that digital technology hasn’t made modest inroads. Quite a few classical musicians now dabble here, often controlling page turns with a foot pedal. Violinist Daniel Hope, for example, who, like most professional musicians usually performs without music, but last year used an iPad to help navigate the fiendishly tricky rhythms of a postmodern reworking of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. 

And the technology does seem to be gaining traction in the educational music sector. Dan Bauer, executive vice-president at global sheet music publisher Hal Leonard, reports that his company now offers an Essential Elements app, allowing students to play along with a recording, record their own playing, send it to their teacher and monitor improvement and number of practice sessions. The company’s software also enables musicians to tweak the score in front of them, transposing a piece’s key for example.

But Bauer is sceptical whether iPads will ever make a serious dent in sheet music sales. “IPads can fail and get lost. And you have to think about school budgets and internet infrastructure,” he says.

Chris Butler, chief operating officer at global music publishers Music Sales Group, shares these reservations. “We do a lot of focus groups about this, and the concern is always ‘what happens if this breaks down?’ That’s a very real concern,” he says. 

“The other thing is that physical music is a funny size,” he adds. “It’s not iPad size, it’s not even A4 size. Some orchestral players share one score between two so the very practical requirement is it’s got to be big enough for them both to see it. And of course musicians need to be able to annotate their scores.”

Pop preference

The bigger threat to printers of sheet music is perhaps people downloading music to print on desktop printers, with this apparently popular not so much with the classical or teaching markets, but for popular contemporary music, according to Butler. But, though this part of the business was established over a decade ago, still less than 10% of the company’s revenue is generated from digital downloads, he reports. 

Mark Goddard is founder of Spartan Press, a music publisher, printer and distributor based in a shooting lodge in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands. He confirms that the current situation is that more casual, often pop-loving, musicians enjoy this as a handy, quick-fire service. But professional musicians, and those learning their instrument more formally, still largely prefer the real deal.

“If you’re sat by the fire with your fiddle thinking ‘Ooh, it’s the Commonwealth games in Glasgow, I’d like to play the Skye Boat Song’. You type it into Google, download it, play it, throw it away,” he says. “But I sometimes think, in a way, we’re in the gift business because a lot people value a gorgeous printed item.”

Of those learning an instrument, he says: “You’ve worked for that new book with the hours you’ve put in practicing, you’ve covered it with fingerings – so it becomes a memento of that journey.”

Also keeping this area of the print industry nicely buoyant are the opportunities opened up by digital production technology. Duncan Roeser, account manager at Halstan Press, reports that not only does digital print mean music publishers can now, like other kinds of buyers, order work in shorter, waste- and space-saving runs. As in the book publishing sector, it’s also opening up this service to smaller publishers.

“Anything where there’s less cost, you can take greater risks editorially, so certainly this is opening up the sorts of music getting printed,” he says. “We have self-publishers printing music for a variety of reasons: often just to give to family, but also to use as a platform to go on to bigger things.”

He adds: “Music never seems to die – so it reprints and reprints. Then you’ve got composers coming out of copyright 70 years after their death. Not that long ago Rachmaninov came out of copyright in some territories, so there was a flurry of new work produced from different publishers.” 

Accounts of how buoyant this sector still is might beg the question for some printers of whether there’s room for them to get involved. Mostly mono and in sheet or booklet form, music printing certainly seems on the face of it,a pretty straightforward job. 

But those handful of UK printers active here would suggest otherwise. Many of Spartan’s clients require the company to do the type setting as well, or at the very least tweak layouts, reports Goddard. 

“Where we’re strong is we’re on the same wavelength as creative types,” says Goddard, who started life as a music teacher in Oxford. “We can play our part by, as musicians, putting our arm around these guys and saying ‘I’m going to help you prepare your creativity for the practical challenges of creating the artwork’.”

Similarly, it speaks volumes that Halstan has two Steinway pianos in its boardroom (one of which composer Benjamin Britten has apparently played on), and that the company was, in the words of Roeser, “born out of music publishing” when established almost 100 years ago.

“We’ve got musicians on the pre-press side – the music generally comes in in good shape, but we do need to be able to identify any potential mistakes,” says Roeser. 

The actual printing and finishing of the books is also more specialised than you might expect. 

“For musicians, usually busy with both hands, the music has to lay flat, that is a fundamental requirement,” says Roeser. “So what we’ve done – and we’ve spent a long time researching the best method of binding for this – is invest in cold dispersion glue rather than hotmelt glue. We can go right down to 50 copies thread-sewn (thread sewn being very important for the longevity required for music books), all the way up to many thousands.

“Music is different sizes to other work and printed on different paper,” he adds. “If there’s too great a contrast that could be a bit of a distraction; it needs to be immaculate but, equally, soothing to the eye and easy to read in dimly lit orchestra pits.”

“It matters how the music is bound because it has to be quiet for turning pages,” adds Sue Clemence, digital production manager at Oldacres, which prints music for a wide range of publishers, and most prestigiously of late for Gavin Higgins, whose work Velocity is to be premiered at the Last Night of the Proms.

“We offer binding where it’s a continuous piece of plastic. It’s like the wire-bound books but plastic so it doesn’t catch where it’s crimped together,” explains Clemence.

Working in harmony

So long-established music printing specialists do seem to have this side of the market sewn-up. But might the opportunity for other printers lie in translating innovative ideas and technologies they’re using for other printed products, to music?

A good example of exactly this is West Sussex-based, commercial printer and personalised product specialist The Printed Word. Having no prior experience of music printing, the company recently secured a contract with online sheet music retailer Musicroom.com, thanks to its web-to-print expertise, which it uses to produce personalised, bespoke music books for the retailer.

Although the project – the first of its kind – is only just completing its soft launch phase, so far appetite seems good. Owner of The Printed Word Rob Pryer warns though that, for now, Musicroom is probably satisfying what appetite there currently is for these kinds of products.

He adds that this isn’t just any web to print job. Musicroom apparently spent several years looking for a web-to-print platform sophisticated enough for its requirements. “The real strength of the Catfish software is its ability to be linked up to an enormous library, and to delete files automatically to ensure the security of Musicroom’s material,” reports Pryer.

Whether this is an area other music publishers will get involved with, enlisting the help of other web-to-print-savvy printers, remains to be seen. As does the future growth of appetite for music downloadable from the internet that consumers and professional musicians can then read using either a desktop -printed sheet or a cleverly designed iPad app. 

Indeed, the ever-more ubiquitous iPad could one day make more of a splash here that currently expected. Music Sales Group’s Butler reports of string quartets and orchestras already using the technology; the added advantage being that the conductor can pen notes that then automatically appear on each musician’s score.

For now though, sheet size, black and white contrast, risk of technology malfunction and cost, all pose barriers. Barriers that print, along with representing a highly graphic, beautiful and cherished object for many musicians, effortlessly overcomes.