What Is a PD Sheet Music Reprint?

The proof that a song is in the public domain is any sheet music publication with a copyright date of 1929 or earlier. Our PD Sheet Music is designed to provide all the information you need to prove that a song is in the public domain in the USA.    PD Sheet Music is available as a PDF for Download or Printed Sheet Music shipped by mail. Each Download or Reprint comes in one of two formats depending on whether the PD Source is from Sheet Music or from a Songbook or Hymnal.

The links below are examples of the Star Spangled Banner for each PD type and format:

Star Spangled Banner Download from Sheet Music Star Spangled Banner Download from a Song Book Star Spangled Banner PD Reprint from Sheet Music Star Spangled Banner PD Reprint from a Song Book

For reprints prepared from Sheet Music, we include the cover and all pages of the sheet music.   When music is reprinted from a book, each song title shows the book cover, title page, copyright notice, and entire index of the book where the song was published.  In addition to all pages of the sheet music, we show the copyright notice enlarged enough to be clearly readable.

Our PD Downloads are PDFs that can be printed or the sheet music can be extracted to use as you need. Our PD Reprints are printed in black on antique-white paper in 11" x 17" sheet music format and folded to 8-1/2" x 11".   While the sheet music is an exact replica of the original, it is scaled to fit an 8-1/2" x 11" page and may be slightly larger or slightly smaller than the original publication.

The Star Spangled Banner samples above are low resolution files compressed enough to view on the internet, but the files are too small to produce a quality printout.   Reprints are actually printed from much higher resolution images and will look substantially better than sheet music in the sample files above.

Do I Really Need A Reprint?

No proof of public domain is legally required to use a public domain song or musical work.   But you cannot positively know that a song is in the public domain unless you actually have a true public domain copy of the sheet music with a valid copyright notice of 1929 or earlier.

Today, we think of a song as having specific lyrics always sung with the same melody.  But many songs evolved over time, and any arrangement of a PD song created after 1929 is under copyright protection.  The only way to know precisely what lyrics and melody are in the public domain is to work exclusively from a public domain version.   We will be the first to tell you that most popular songs and hymns are known today in essentially the same form as the PD version.  But this is just not always true.  For most folk songs, spirituals, and songs written in the 1800s or earlier, the popular version known today is NOT the public domain version but is actually a derivative version created after 1929 from a much older version of the song.

There is an incredibly large volume of music published from the beginning of time through 1929.   PD Info works very hard to make our lists of public domain music accurate and reliable. But music researchers are human, and even the best of us do occasionally make errors.

In most instances, we would tell you that a $5 PD Reprint is "cheap insurance" to positively know that a song you use is truly in the public domain in the USA.  But only you can decide if you need proof of public domain status.  Our PD Reprints are priced at what it costs us to produce them, and we offer them as a service to make public domain music readily available to everyone.