Music Publishers and Printers

Sheet Music and Music Booklets

Students and professional musicians alike expect sheet music to be printed on 12"x18" paper. Since musicians are accustomed to this format, any other size would face a chilly reception. The problem for the music publisher is that market forces are pushing them to find more economical and timely methods for printing music than is possible with offset presses. For instance, demand for a particular style or piece of music varies with time, as tastes and trends change. This creates pressure on the publisher to add more titles, more arrangements and more composers to his offerings even though run lengths need to be small. Minimum offset print quantities force the publisher to tie money up in inventory that may never be sold, and to pay for warehousing in the meantime.

The ideal solution is to print music On Demand. Printing on demand makes it easy to add new pieces to the catalog, and respond to customer orders with virtually instantaneous turnaround. Printing on demand eliminates the need to predict which pieces will be popular and for how long. Publishers never have to put a title out of print.

The problem up until now has been the inability of digital printers to output music on large format cut sheet paper. XSIS has solved that problem. With the XSIS Large Format printer, publishers can print music duplexed on 12"x18" paper at 600 dpi with the throughput expected from a Xerox high speed printer.

A Signature Booklet Maker can be added to print booklets of music. The sheet music can be printed on 12"x18.5" paper so that there is room for trimming to final size. If the printed content on the cover can be black and white, even the covers can be printed on demand using normal cover grade stock. For those music book series or methods books that have the same art work on each volume, but a different title, any color graphics can be pre-printed on cover stock using an offset press. Then the appropriate title can be printed on each cover in the same run as the inside pages