Fifteen Years of forScore
Making music since 2010
A message from forScore
Hello, I’m Justin Bianco and I make forScore. I bought a book on programming back in December 2009, taught myself just enough to get started, and created a new project in Xcode that would change my life forever. A few short months later, having never even seen an iPad in real life, I released forScore 1.0 and the rest is history.
When I started I had a vision for what I wanted to create but no certainty that it would garner enough support to get there. Just a few weeks after its release, though, it was clear I’d tapped into something significant. Musicians everywhere participated in this journey, helping me to improve year over year and suddenly here we are looking back at fifteen years of steady improvement. I know how lucky I am to have succeeded, and to have had so many people out there helping me along the way.
In 2020, as we got ready to celebrate ten years of forScore, the pandemic was dramatically reshaping the world and musicians everywhere were struggling. I created this page to commemorate that milestone but we never published it—touting our success back then just didn’t feel right. Now reaching year 15 gives us another great opportunity to pause and note just how far we’ve come.
The world has changed so much since 2010. Technology has changed and how we use it has changed—for better and for worse. It’s a privilege and a big responsibility to be a part of its evolution. The work is never done, but we keep pushing forward to make the world a little brighter and improve the lives of those around us. Thank you for enabling me to do so for fifteen years so far and however many are still to come.
Sincerely,
Justin Bianco
By the numbers
102,051,031 forScore sessions in 2024 (based on Apple’s opt-in analytics, actual number is higher)
67,396 five-star ratings on the App Store (and counting)
175 countries and regions where forScore is sold
39 iPad models introduced 2010-2025
26 significant forScore updates
15 major OS versions
14 languages forScore has been translated into
7 times as many pixels in the 13″ iPad Pro versus the original iPad 1
7 Apple events that featured forScore’s icon on stage
4 supported platforms (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS)
1 forScore’s average ranking in the top paid iPad music apps
Three cheers
forScore allows my 80 year old, flute playing mother, who has low vision, to continue to jam and perform with her friends. Previously, she had to waste time each week enlarging and preparing her sheet music. Thanks forScore!
Hi, I just wanted to send a quick note to say a million thanks for this fantastic app. I’ve been using it for the last year, and as a classical concert pianist, I find it absolutely invaluable. It was a revolution to my everyday life at work. Now, this fall you introduced face gestures. I thought it was too good to be true. It wasn’t. It has now been almost 4 months, and I’m still ecstatic over this new feature. Every single page turn is now a source of joy of not having to do anything but a simple and intuitive flick of the lips. Wizardry!
forScore was the reason for me to buy an iPad – it’s the most important app on my device. Finally, I don’t have bring a big folder to rehearsals. And, equally important: to find every song on the fly (on stage), when seconds count. Thanks a lot, also for the great improvements over time!
forScore has been something I literally could not do my job without for the last 15 years. As someone who often performs theme shows in a variety of genres, as well as backing celebrities from time to time, I routinely need to access over 800 individual pieces of sheet music. This would be impossible any other way. Not only is it the most flexible way to access sheet music, it is full of delightful touches that you may not appreciate until later – like discovering that I can drag and drop images into a score, or that it will send midi messages to my guitar rig if I so choose, or that I can wirelessly synchronize it with the band’s performance computer. On top of that, you have tasteful design, and rock solid stability. And then the cherry on the sundae is that Justin is a delightful human! Congratulations and happy 15th anniversary!
When we were doing the tour of the album Volta, we had touchscreens. This was before iPads. Whenever there’s new technology, one of my favorite things—a sort of murder mystery thing—is to figure out, “Oh, what’s this for?” A lot of things are rubbish, but there’s always one thing where it’s like, “Oh, technology finally caught up with us, and now it can map out this very natural function in me.” It makes life easier. People think I’m really, really good with technology. Actually, it’s the other way around. I’m really rubbish. When an iPad comes along, it makes technology usable for me.
– Björk whose Cornucopia tour relied on forScore on stage
Gone green
Hundreds of thousands of musicians have potentially spared millions of pieces of paper and countless trees over the past decade by using forScore. We’ll never be able to quantify it, and it’s not nearly enough, but forScore and its users played a part in preserving our world’s ecosystems—that’s something we can all be proud of.
forScore is made in Seattle, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It’s a region that’s known for its lush evergreen forests, so the idea of saving trees isn’t some remote concept here: it’s part of our home and our DNA. We’ll continue fighting every day to protect it and every person’s right to grow up in a world with fresh air, clean water, and a future to look forward to.
I have been a musician for just about all my life. Things had started to move and grow musically for me when I first came across forScore. I was leading a band for a large 4-day gig with over 60 songs. Making binders for 5-6 other band members with all the sheet music and notes and dividers and, and, and, I just didn’t want to have to carry that around myself as well. So I decided to buy an iPad and start my journey in digital sheet music. I have not looked back since. After my supervisor saw how easy and clean it was having the iPad and forScore, we switched as much of the team as we could to iPads and purchased the app.
That team, which I am still part of, is still using this system to this day. It has cleaned up our stage presence (little to no music stands) and makes it so easy to make sure everyone has the right music or even passing music along to each other through forScore if someone is missing it. With now having that large gig every year for the past 6 years, forScore has been with us the entire way. I now have over 2,000 pieces of music in my app. I can’t imagine physically carrying all that. From songbooks to sheet music to choral pieces, forScore can handle it all. And adding my AirTurn page-turner was another game-changer. The two work together so well. I recommend forScore to anyone who asks how I use my sheet music digitally. Thank you, everyone, at forScore for keeping with this app and making it better and better with each update.
– Nairobi, forScore user since 2014
Retrospective
To celebrate forScore’s fifth and tenth birthdays, we took a look back at our app to see how quickly it changed over that time span. Now that story continues with five more years worth of history and versions—click below to see the updated retrospective. As we said back then, “five years from now, we hope to be right back here, with even more chapters, successes, leaps, missteps, and laughs.” Cheers to that.