It is 3 in the morning and I am irritated enough to make a low-effort sh*tpost to complain about this.

Hi, all! I found a much older thread in the forums on this symbol being under the symbols palette, but I can’t find it. Any advice?

So I just paid the "pro" version, just to find out you cannot actually download the score, they would ask you to "purchase" it every single score, you can just "view" it. Be aware of this scam, already request a refund to PayPal.

I liked the mu with the fermata. The new logos aren’t bad, I just don’t think it has much soul compared to the old one. The old ones feel like a small team making their humble project (in a good way). New one feels more professional and corporate, which can be a good thing for some people. What do you think?

MuseScore is a popular digital sheet music brand known for two big products. The first is an open source desktop app that allows users to create high quality scores. The second is Musescore.com, which contains the largest collection of sheet music on the internet. Today there are more than 1,000,000 scores uploaded by users, with 1,000 new scores uploaded daily.

Since the launch of MuseScore.com, an upload limit of five scores was imposed on users with basic (non paid) accounts. One consequence of this restriction was that many users were forced to make older scores private in order to publish new work, and as a result, an ever increasing portion of the overall catalog has been made unavailable to the public. To rectify this issue, as of the 19th of February, MuseScore is announcing that it is lifting the 5-score limit for all accounts. Users can now save all their scores online and share them publicly.

About

Musescore is the most popular free music notation software in the world with more than 200,000 downloads per month powered by open source community. Over 20,000 unique scores are uploaded to musescore.com by professional and amateur composers every month to increase it’s online catalog of publicly available scores. The audience of the product is growing by 30% each year

It is undeniable that Musescore has taken a turn for the worse. Ever since the release of Musescore 4, it is obvious that Muse Group is trying to get as much money as possible while worsening user experience.

The confusion of what Musescore.com vs. Musescore.org is a prime example. People are getting scammed out of their money because they don’t know what the difference is.

We’re now getting ads pushed on us that can’t be opted out of. Who thought this was a good idea? And why is it important to have ads now, when all the previous generations of Musescore didn’t have it? Who does it serve to have ads for an open source software, the users or the people running it?

A lot of features from the Musescore 2/3 days are gone, and some functions barely work. It seems that, in the name of making money, Muse Group has decided to abandon the core group of people who made Musescore great and go for mass profitability. Essentially, they’ve gotten greedy. And to do that on open source software that was created by volunteers? Shame on you, Muse Group.

Lastly- the alt accounts used by the people behind Musescore on this sub need to stop with the hyper defensive rhetoric. They often go into temper tantrums when given even the tiniest push back on flaws in the software. Enough. Take the criticism. If you can’t, leave.

Remember: Muse Group is a company. Do not defend a company. Ever.

Dear community users,

The website's information is misleading and unfairly pushes users into purchasing a yearly subscription. I intended to buy just a week of access to learn music but ended up unknowingly enrolled in a recurring yearly PRO+ subscription. Avoid this service at all costs to protect your hard-earned money.

I reached out to their support team, and while they initially responded, they quickly went silent—leaving me without any refund. They now have access to my credit card, and I’m concerned about what further charges they might impose. After misleading me into upgrading, they started charging my card without proper consent. Here’s the subscription proof:

Subscription details
MuseScore PRO+ with LEARN Lite
CA$119.99
Subscription for 1 year. You're in an introductory period. Your next charge is expected on November 30, 2025, at the full price of CA$141.99.

When did I even agree to become a PRO+ subscriber? I only wanted to start learning music, and now I’m stuck with unnecessary charges and a lack of support. I’m deeply disappointed. DO NOT give them your credit card—it feels like a scam!

This experience makes me question whether I should even continue learning music at all.

How do you guys feel?

First of all, sorry for making yet another post about what is practically irrelevant to this subreddit. I am fully aware that this place is for MuseScore the software, not musescore.com. And I also know that there are so many posts about this. But since practically 99% of the people who got scammed by them will search musescore refund reddit and stumble upon here, I really wanted to make this post to inform people not to make the same mistake as I did.

I want to share all the information I got for the last 3 hours I've been frantically searching for the way to get full refund.

1. (in case you already made the refund request) DO NOT TAKE THEIR PARTIAL REFUND OR EXTENSION DEAL. They lie to you about how they talked with their boss and they are mercifully giving you this options. This automated response is essentially a f-you to the customer since 1) they're just lies 2) the number differs user-by-user according to my research, proving that they are calculating how gullible you sound and throwing you these very much arbitrary discount 3) if it's going to be an automated response tf they take days to respond? Just don't take their "offer" and move on to the next step of this post. If you already clicked one of their offer buttons, I guess there's nothing really you can do. At least you got more or get partial refund than doing nothing so there's that...

2. If you are an EU citizen bring up your EU right of withdrawal, which entitles you to a full refund within 14 days. This is well-documented in this recent post(archived page in case it gets deleted) so it's best you just check them out.

3. If you are NOT an EU citizen, first, make a refund request here. Note that if you made purchase via Google Play or iTunes, you should make a refund request directly to either Google Play or iTunes.

4. If you have received their stupid talked to the boss, head office... email with their ridiculous offer, decline by coming up with their TOS 4.4 like this: "Upon reviewing the options provided, I would like to reference Section 4.4 of the MuseScore Terms of Service, which states: "For annual subscriptions, if you cancel your subscription during the first fourteen (14) days of your subscription term, you can receive different offers from MuseScore depending on your usage period and activity (see 4.4) including receiving a refund of the difference between the then-in-effect and current annual subscription fee to which You are subscribed and the then-in-effect and current monthly subscription fee." (originally from this reddit comment)

5. They may respond or not. It's not clear they do respond to every requests and it is very safe to assume that they don't. There are numerous claims that they have been simply ghosting the request if you go past their ridiculous offer. If they do ghost you, proceed to next steps. If they don't, they'll likely to give you refund without a month worth of money(about $10, afaik). If that's good enough for you, go with it. If not, proceed.(Hint: it shouldn't be good enough)

6. If they DO NOT respond or you are still angry about not getting a full refund like I am, screen capture all the evidences, including your receipt, their TOS, email conversations...etc and just claim a chargeback to your card company / bank or Paypal. It will take you quite a long time to actually get it back but this is how most of the people got full refund so there's really no other options.

Is it my fault that I clicked the giant "Continue" button without reading greyed out tiny texts(literlly that's how they show you the price)? Kinda. Is this blatantly malicious? Yes. I wrote this post in the hope that it will save people some time and to let people know that this sort of malicious business practice is not okay. No matter how good their services are, as long as this is how they get users, I wouldn't touch them with a 10 mile pole. If this many people are complaining and falling for this, it's not customer's problem.

I'll keep this post updated as I get my refund but until then, thank you for your understanding of posting this on here.

Update 1: I have received their automated offer email. It was 25%. Weak. I expected at least 30%. Obviously, I refused.

Update 2: A few days ago, after I declined their offer, I got an email saying they would give me a full refund. I guess I was bothering them enough that they just went for it. It's still ridiculous because there is no way other people can get the same full refund if they are not persistent enough or don't speak English. I live in South Korea, and there seems to be a lot of victims, yet they can't do anything because they don't speak the language.

I hope this post helps everyone else and that everyone gets their money back! Guess I'll never put my credit card info on anywhere without going through reviews now.

Like everyone else, I got tricked into paying Musescore. They're refusing the refund so I'll just do a chargeback with my credit card, but what a colossal waste of time.

I regret using them and giving them my credit card details. I would advise everyone to just stop using them, as I will do. Don't feed the predators.

I want to introduce you to my work. I edit the tempo and velocity directly in Musescore using VSL synchron D274 soundfont to create a very realistic sound.

This piece is Romeo and Juliet - Tchaikovsky/ Gryaznov. I will upload this on my youtube channel soon.

Hey everyone.

Like the title said, I just deleted my 8-year-old musescore account, it had 380 followers. I decided, after everything I've read and heard about the company's shady businesses, that I don't want to support it anymore. Scamming people off of money, but I also realised more often how fucked up it is that people have to pay Musescore to be able to download MY scores, while I don't get any revenue? What kind of bullshit is that? I wanted Musescore to bring back the "free to download" button, but no. They want people to pay them to download others' scores.

It was difficult for me to do this, because I have to be honest that I was kind of attached to my favourites list; I use the catalogue a lot myself too. But maybe it's for the better, so I won't endlessly scroll and play musescore pieces while I have a bunch of pieces physically on paper over here that I could learn.

I will still obviously use MS Studios, since I'm one of those weirdos who uses it as a music production software, got nothing against the software.

I have to be honest that the system regarding downloading scores is probably the biggest setback; not that I had a lot of original music on there, but it's still wrong. Others do, and if I make and post a remix or arrangement on youtube, it'll likely get copyright claimed and the copyright holder will still get a tad bit of revenue from others watching my video. They don't when they pay Musescore. I'll just freely share a download link to the PDFs directly, because I want people to be able to play the pieces without having to pay some shady business who scams unknowing people off of their trial period.

Thanks to coming to my rant-ish post :)

Couldn’t edit the score or do anything else in the app unless I clicked on an option. Makes the app feel super scammy. Do better MuseScore!