While most of these sites will only offer sheet music that is in the public domain, there are some contemporary composers who offer their wares to the public for free. If it's on the internet (legally) you can find it at one of the fives sites below, without having to sign up for a bunch of stuff you don't want or need.
- IMSLP – Petrucci Music Library. Probably the web's best resource for public domain sheet music with more than 100,000 scores and 2,700 recordings in over a dozen languages. With all those scores you'd think they have to have a good indexing service, and they do: filter capabilities include composer name, time period, instrumentation, genre, language or even by melody (beta version). Affiliated with Amazon, if you do end up using sheet music downloaded from this site, they'd surely appreciate it if you click on the "Donate" button and give back a little where you got.
- ChoralWiki. Done in the wiki tradition, this page has the usual wiki-tabs at the top: discussion, view source, and history. The descendant of Choral Public Domain Library, CPDL became ChoralWiki in 2005, and now boasts nearly 10,000 music texts. There are actually two different sites: ChoralWiki visitor, which allows you to download sheet music but not to edit; and ChoralWiki contributor, which requires you to register or log in order to be able to submit scores or edit ones that are already uploaded.
- freesheetmusic.net. One neat thing about this site is that they link directly to guitar tab, banjo tab, and even dulcimer tab. There's plenty of sheet music organized by the first name of the composer here, with most of it in the classical genre.
- abcmusic.net. If it's contemporary stuff like Justin Timberlake, Kelly Clarkson, Britney Spears, and more, this is the site you'll want to start with. Downloads come in .zip format, so you'll need winzip or a similar service to be able to unzip the files once you've downloaded them, and then they come as .tiff, .jpg, or .pdf files. Along with an assortment of modern tunes, they've also got a blog link on the site, although it doesn't appear to have been updated in a few years.
- freescores.com. Although the English on the page appears to have been written by someone not so familiar with the rules of Engrish grammar, it's probably a side effect of the French-to-English translator program. Whatever, it's all about the music, right? And music they have plenty of. They claim 40,000 pdf sheet music files and nearly 20,000 mp3's, not all of which is available for free, but a lot of it is. The "Most Downloaded" sidebar is a neat feature, as is the filter section that allows you to search the sheet music by a number of different instruments, including winds, strings, and keyboards. Heck, they've even got sheet music for the French horn.
David Turner enjoys researching various schools that offer online music degrees.
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