"How “The Perfect Scores” web site works is simple. A customer purchases a one year subscription for $29.95 to download their music scores in PDF and Encore format.
Their information page has the subscription information with the following come-ons:
“By signing up to the Silver Membership now, you'll have immediate access to download 1150 Perfect Scores available today. Since we keep adding new Perfect Scores almost daily, you will obviously have access to those too.”
“This Will Change Soon--Be quick, though. We just don't know how long we can keep this Membership rate so low…Therefore, we only guarantee this rate until Midnight Tuesday May 30, 2006.”
There are two lies in the above text from their information page:
1. Examining the web site indicates that the last update was almost two years ago. They are not “adding new Perfect Scores almost daily.”
2. The “expiration date” for the “guaranteed rate” is always midnight on the day you are viewing the web page. In other words, the expiration date is a sham. Their server always places today’s date in the text to fool the reader into believing that he better sign up now before the membership price goes up!
I had been searching for months for many of the piano pieces they offer in their Ernesto Nazareth collection. So, I decided to take a chance with them. I purchased a membership and downloaded several of their music scores. A quick examination revealed that they are far from “perfect” by any stretch of the imagination.
For example, several measures in nearly every piano transcription from their Ernesto Nazareth collection have the timing alignment off by as much as a 16th note between the left and right hand staffs. Since a musical score is a graph of time verses pitch, the most fundamental, basic requirement of any music score, that has two or more staffs per line, is that the timing of the notes line up between the staffs! If they do not align, then it is impossible to sight read and very difficult to learn the music. So much for the “impressive and meticulous precision” engraving work they claim to have put in to each score.
I emailed their customer service twice about this and have never received an answer. They have a “money-back guarantee” on their information page, but it is useless if you cannot contact them!
Although they have Visa and MasterCard logos on their membership page, they only accept PayPal and Click Bank (a PayPal clone, apparently) for payment. That seems a bit deceptive, wouldn’t you say? The receiving PayPal account is an email address in Brazil, by the way.
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Update: May 31, 2006: I am opening a dispute with this store through PayPal. Let's see if this gets a response from them.
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Update: June 2, 2006: After filing a PayPal dispute, they refunded my money and left my account open. I appreciate the gesture, but because of the above cited problems (among others) their scores are too aggravating to use.
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