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One of the company’s secrets is the sheer volume of music they offer — more than 555,000 titles. The company’s added about 100,000 titles in the last 18 months, plus they’ve collected data on all of their titles, and created a searchable database of printed music. That helps the company when its trying to move into new markets, such as music teachers. In fact, Sheet Music Plus signed up 17,000 music teachers for a rebate program.

The company also turned its modest growth into a plus. Cerny said that, in addition to revenue growth and profit, the company has always paid close attention to another metric — revenue per employee. He said that keeping track of that statistic helped the company grow as much as 25 percent per year during the downturn.

Sheet Music Plus has also benefited from the unique nature of the sheet music industry. It has contracts with about 1,000 labels to sell their content (some of the labels share a parent company, though). And because the labels sign exclusive distribution deals with record companies, companies don’t really mind that they’re available at the same online store as their competitors. And some of the music publishers actually like it.

David Jahnke is vice president of national sales at Hal Leonard, a music publisher that has 140,000 titles at the Sheet Music Plus store. He says that Hal Leonard is the exclusive print provider of Disney, EMI, Universal and Rogers and Hammerstein, to name a few, so if people want sheet music from any of those sources they have to buy Hal Leonard.

But he also says that all of the publishers have competitive content, and using Sheet Music Plus, people can see a sample of their products and a sample of their competitors’ products and see which one they like better.

“Competition is healthy. We don’t mind being put out there with all the other publishers,” Jahnke said.

Jahnke also finds Sheet Music Plus’ comprehensive database useful because it’s made for everyone’s catalogue. When he goes to a music store, he often sees the employees looking on Sheet Music Plus to figure out who publishes what.

The company is concentrated on growing even more. The global sheet music industry is about $1.1 billion, with about half of that in the United States, Cerny said. And Sheet Music Plus is only a $25 million company — so far. The company just completed their data center, which is in San Francisco, to help prime for this expansion.

They face competition from other pure-play online sheet music sellers, as well as music stores and more general retailers like Amazon.com. And to help keep ahead of that competition, they want to expand into new markets internationally and more institutional markets, like schools, locally. Cerny said that the company does about 80 percent of its business in the United States.

The company is hiring in their marketing and fulfillment departments, but Cerny couldn’t nail down exactly how many. But they have an interesting qualification preference — they try to hire musicians. Of their 40 employees, two-thirds are musicians, including Cerny, who is a conservatory-trained pianist.

“We very much like to think of ourselves as a company run by musicians for musicians of all different kinds,” he said.