Wikifonia

» see wikifonia.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A lead sheet is the smallest useful way to write down a song. One stave with the melody, the chord symbols above it, the words underneath, and nothing else: no arrangement, no piano reduction. It is what a working musician actually needs, and for most of the twentieth century getting one legally was close to impossible. The famous collection, the Real Book, was a bootleg that circulated through music schools for decades without paying anyone it copied.

Wikifonia went live on 6 November 2006, built collaboratively by several higher education institutes in Ghent, and its pitch was that the bootleg problem was solvable with paperwork. Sheets were stored as MusicXML rather than as scans, which meant the site held the song as data: you could transpose it into your own key before printing it, and the file opened in notation software instead of a picture viewer. Anyone could publish a sheet and pick a license for their own work, and the site pitched itself as a place to find other writers to collaborate with.

The hard part was everything else on the site. Music published through Wikifonia was cleared by Musi©opy, a copyright clearance organization in the Netherlands, with the fees paid by the Wikifonia Foundation, a nonprofit founded in July 2006. The homepage said it in two flat lines that are still legible in the archive: browse and download high quality lead sheets for free, and author rights of copyrighted music are compensated.

~ the case file ~

~ the license ~

Deals of that kind have an end date. Wikifonia's ran to the close of 2013, and when the foundation went back to extend it the extension did not come. What shows up on the record is bureaucratic rather than adversarial: a rights agreement reaching its final year, and a nonprofit that could not renew it on terms it was able to pay.

The last working capture of the homepage is from 2 November 2013. By February the address was serving 1,024 bytes of white text on a dark page: "Dear visitor, The Wikifonia site is not available anymore. A license to secure the rights of copyrighted works could not be extended. There is no more access to the Wikifonia lead sheet database." Underneath that, a line pointing visitors at MuseScore, whose free software could at least help them make lead sheets themselves.

~ what the zip did next ~

The collection was 6,675 sheets and the whole thing fit in about 35 megabytes, which is the kind of number that decides what happens to a dead website. Somebody had a copy. Within months of the shutdown the full archive was moving around forums for banjo players and ukulele players, hosted on whatever personal web space the poster happened to have, under a filename everybody recognized.

Its second life is stranger. I work on machine learning for a living, and the Wikifonia dump is now a standard corpus in symbolic music research: there is a loader for it in the MusPy toolkit, and derived datasets sit on Hugging Face waiting to be fed into generative models. A set of songs that was painstakingly cleared under a 2006 Dutch rights agreement, so that guitar teachers could print them legally, is currently training software to write melodies. The license expired. The files did not.

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