Today is a momentous day for the Zinfonia team: we have officially passed the milestone of 100000 registered accounts. That so many individuals have navigated the registration process to explore what we offer is truly humbling, and I want to mark this occasion by reflecting on our journey.
The concept of Zinfonia was first introduced at a meeting of music publishers at the Frankfurt Musikmesse back in April 2009. At this time, most of the major rental libraries of the world were managed by a piece of software I wrote when I left my role of Head of Promotion at the Sydney office of Boosey & Hawkes in 1998 called HLMSW. I had the idea that combining the data of all of these individual systems would create a resource unlike any other. Following the meeting, a new company called Zinfonia Holdings was created as a partnership between my Company (BTM Innovation) and 4 of the biggest names in Classical music at the time: Boosey and Hawkes, Music Sales (now Wise Music), Peters Edition, and the Universal Music Group. In 2011, at the Major Orchestral Librarian Conference in London we announced the launch of the Zinfonia service which quickly grew to be a central player in the delivery of all rental materials worldwide.
In 2023, ownership of the Zinfonia Holdings company was transferred to me and in 2024, we launched a completely new Zinfonia site along with a new publisher-centric sister site called InCopyright (or In©). We continue to develop and expand our services, which now include some 120K works by 14K composers from 684 publisher imprints, processing more than 1.4M messages and requests from users in 155 countries.
We are proud of many aspects of our operation, which is borne out of the complexity of creating a cohesive platform from so many different sources to fulfil orders in so many countries. For example, every single composer in our database has been manually curated to maintain an accurate and comprehensive resource which is under constant revision. I created the now ubiquitous system for instrument identification (called the Universal Instrumentation Code or UIC) and recently introduced a similarly free to use distribution platform called Connect in Copyright (CinC) which provides important common standards for sheet music distribution, especially in this digital age.
We have also responded to many thousands of questions from musicians and librarians to assist them in their journey, and we take pride in the speed and personal nature of these responses (no AI bots here!).
The Zinfonia team is pretty small – just three of us make the system function. While I have undertaken all of the software development myself, the platform would not exist without the support of two invaluable colleagues. Ulrich Steffen Eck has been with me on the Zinfonia project from the very first day, and it has been a wonderfully rich collaboration. Steffen has many talents – he is a musicologist, a polyglot (an essential skill for international publisher and customer assistance), a librarian with vast experience and has committed a large slab of his working life to this project. Joanne Hayley, my partner in life but also the manager of everything administrative and financial keeps everything running smoothly. Zinfonia would not exist without these two and it has been such a joy to have such dedicated and talented colleagues and friends.
There have been many others along the way that have contributed to Zinfonia in all its forms that I would like to mention including Kent Hoskins, Janis Susskind and Bevis Hungate (Boosey & Hawkes), Bob Wise, James Rushton, Chris Butler, Adam Harvey (Wise Music), Simon Baker, Cristiano Ostinelli, Carlo Dalla Vecchia, Simone Fuligno (Universal Music Group), Nicholas Riddle (Peters Edition), Matthew Freeman, Sonya Kim, Melinda Parent (for the Zinfonia logo) and all of our translators including Simone Fuligno, Alessandro Olto, Anna Czajka, Jose Ferrer, Marin Fauvel and Denis Feletto.
Finally, I want to thank all our publishing partners and our customers, many of whom have contributed in so many ways to make the platform better every day. We look forward to continuing to serve you into the future.
Peter Grimshaw December 15, 2025.