MusicLithuania.com, an online store offering music by Lithuanian composers and launched by the Music Information Centre Lithuania, has just marked its first birthday. The first online shop of the kind and, it currently boasts buyers on all five continents for its over 2,000 pieces of electronic sheet music, 143 pieces of printed sheet music and a variety of albums featuring music by one hundred composers.

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Composers Onutė Narbutaitė, Bronius Kutavičius, Teisutis Makačinas, Zita Bružaitė, and Juozas Naujalis enjoy the highest demand alongside the newest collection of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis’s piano pieces compiled by Vytautas Landsbergis.

The e-store also offers a wide range of songs and instrumental pieces for children as well as a variety of music for professional performers, from instrumentalists and choirs to chamber ensembles and orchestras. The search engine has been adjusted to rank music by instruments making selection easy for teachers and pickiest performers alike. Vinyl records and compact discs split into single composer albums and collections of music by different composers, as many as 135 of them represented currently at the shop.

The analysis of the first-year buyers shows that the e-store has reached performers and listeners far and wide with a third of visitors originating in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Japan, the Netherlands and elsewhere. The shop also occasionally attracts attention of guests from faraway nations, such as India, Thailand, Algeria and Chile.

“We are curious as to how the purchased music lives on and implements its function on other continents, what are the listeners of our music in Asia and Latin America like who have discovered the recordings released by the Music Information Centre Lithuania. The fact that music by Lithuanian composers enjoys demand beyond our borders, while the same buyers come back again and again to musiclithuania.com is a huge motivation to improve and expand the project,” said Lina Aselskytė, the manager of the project.

Very often teachers of music from all over Lithuania approach the Music Information Centre Lithuania asking for more music for children. This is why we keep in touch with our most prolific composers. We urge the teachers to buy sheet music rather than copy it, hence our motto, Support Helps Creativity, which applies to composers, performers, improvisators, teachers and their students as well as other members of the Lithuanian musical ecosystem. The idea has been furthered by Synaesthesis, a Vilnius-based ensemble of new music, which has agreed to lead promotion of the webshop.

All the sheet music and recordings sold on musiclithuania.com possess a distinct character, expressed primarily through design by a wide network of collaborating designers. Taktika, a graphic design studio, has rebranded musiclithuania.com, particularly by turning its initial logo, the stave, into a shopping basket. This is aimed at sending all the visitors a simple message: take the basket, take a tour around the shop and discover Lithuanian composers’ music. We also offer you our branded tote bag, already popular among buyers, which says: “Bag full of Notes”, isn’t it a nice little Christmas gift?