My favorite tab website mxtabs.net went under this week. Apparently it was cutting into industry profits so they started donkey punching sites like this just as RIAA has done to music sharing.
Apparently these tab sites are dropping like flys now. This is horseshit.
I’m a musician, guitar in case you couldn’t figure that out, and I’ve put out a fair amount of original music in my day. I can appreciate the discontent with music sharing because it deprives the artist of revenues. But eliminating internet guitar tabs? This is over the top! These are tabs that people are creating on their home computers by ear, not tabs that are being photocopied from some tab book and being sold on the net. Hell, most of them aren’t even right. If someone wants to tab my tunes and play them in their set more power to them. It isn’t hurting me any and gives me exposure.
What the fuck is going on in this world? What’s next? Pay per listen radio?
Are there tab sites out there for original/non-copyrighted music? If so, find one of those and put your music up there. Otherwise, yeah, it sucks, but they do own the music, so there’s not much you can do about it. Let’s say I write a poem, and sell you a CD of myself reading it. By listening to the CD, you are able to transcribe it, and then post it online. Is that fair, just because you did it by ear?
As for radio, your ability to listen to it is paid for by advertisers, who hope that you’ll hear their ads and buy their stuff in exchange. It’s not quite free.
That’s not a good analogy. You can transcribe a poem 100% acurately, with guitar tab, unless you are watching the artist play, your transcription will always be an approximation of the original resulting in varying degrees of accuracy.
This has been going on for a while; it’s been at least 5 years since the Harry Fox Agency sent a few threatening letters (never followed up on, AFAIK) to OLGA. They shut down completely for a while, and have since been limping along on a much-abbreviated scale.
So, this is why www.powertabs.net isn’t allowing me to download tab files anymore. I have many tabs saved to my hard drive so at least those are still available to me.
I wonder if I could get sued for teaching someone a song that I didn’t own.
What if all those people in CS got sued for posting spoilers? They’re basically giving it all away, after all. Why see the movie when you’ve already found out what’s going on?
Personally, I’d embrace it - let the tabs run wild. It could help spurn creativity, which means more artists for me - as a hypothetical player in the music industry - down the road. Otherwise, what the hell do I care how some jackass figured out how to play my song? I say, let him learn! And when he forms a band and decides to cover it, that’s just more royalties for me.
The music industry is not being very wise on this issue at all, which is no surprise as the Sony DRM matter shows.
The music industry completely relies upon the next generation of talent to continue its business, if they make it more difficult for that talent to develop then it is sawing off the branch of the tree upon which it al rests.
Yes there are such things as royalty rights, companies who market this stuff, and yes, if you have the money, you can purchase it, bit it completely ignores or misunderstands musicians, especially those who are just trying things out or are new to the game.
I have to agree that reading a poem isn’t a good analogy.
If I take guitar lessons, the teacher is most likely going to teach a song I know, not an original song of theirs. Same with a school’s band program. What you have is one person teaching another person how to play the song.
In both cases the teacher is using music that someone else wrote to teach a person how to play the instrument. And the teacher is getting paid for it. Writing out the tablature for a song is the same thing. It’s showing someone how to play the song on a given instrument. And the tab sites are posting it for free. They’re not making money from it.
So what we can deduce from the OP’s cited article is that music teachers should only be allowed to teach music they originally wrote. That’ll go over like a fart in Church.
I was blessed with an ear for music when it comes to playing it. But it wasn’t always so. When I got my first guitar at age 15, I bought the tab book for Ride the Lightning and learned every song, solo and all. It was such a powerful feeling to reproduce all the sounds of songs I enjoyed. It led to a high school career of learning orchestral bass, the French Horn and the Bassoon. That one tab book (Mom couldn’t afford private guitar lessons) opened a whole new world to me. I actively began seeking out other genres of music and live performances of stuff I never would have considered before.
Think of everyone you know with a guitar. I’ll bet the house that most of them picked it up so they could play the songs they love. Tablature is the everyman way of learning how to play them. And, of course, that leads to learning technique that leads to realizing creativity.
Creativity that will, in many cases, lead to a musician being signed by these fucks for fun and profit. I can’t wrap my head around the idea of a musician that learned his instrument in large part because of tablature having a problem with the next 15 year old trying to learn the instrument using tablature of his music.
This shit went too far a few years ago. Good to see they’re still looking for ways to destroy themselves. Fucking douchebags.
If you’ve ever had much experience with online tabs, you’d know that’s exactly the case.
Seriously, tabbing a guitar part is akin to writing a translation from one language into another. You are “translating” something from an aural “text” into a written one. Ti some degree, it’s always a little bit interpretive. It can be very close but it’s still an approximation and essentially a description of the music, not a recording or a duplication of it. Now, specific transcriptions and sheet music can be copyrighted and they are, just like specific translations can be copyrighted. However, any transcription I make myself is my own work and represents my own “translation” of the song. If I share my translation with someone else, I am sharing my own work and not violating a copyright. Basically, the RIAA is trying to make it illegal to teach somebody else how to play a song. It’s complete bullshit. What if I teach somebody how to play a song using only verbal instructions, telling them out loud what to play note-by-note, chord-by-chord (something I’ve done many times as a former guitar instructor and bandmate of more than a few musicians who couldn’t read music)? Am I violating a copyright? How is it any different to write the chords down?
How are midi files affected by all of this? I regularly convert midi files into sheet music so I can jam along with my keyboard and viola. Is this against the law?
I know I’m not entitled to free things, but midi files are so harmless and yet so much fun. I’d hate for it to all be taken away, dammit.
Is it illegal for me to just learn a song by listening to it? Is it illegal for me to show my buddy how to play it?
Purely hypothetical. I’m terrible at figuring out how to play songs. But that’s been going on since before recorded music. Changing the medium for the discourse shouldn’t change anything.
Denny, my guitar teacher was always going on about how lucky we are. “Back when I was a kid, we had to sit around and listen to the music to figure out how to play it. You kids have got it so much better these days with the internet.”
As someone who attempted to learn Imagine off the internet before I learned it from my guitar teacher, I can definitely tell you that tabs are like translations, and some of them are pretty shitty translations.
I understand lyrics are copyrighted, but it’s not like companies mass produce them in large packets so you can read them. Half the time, when you can find the lyrics in that little booklet, it’s in size 8 font, and not exactly the best reference material. I look up lyrics when I can’t understand what the lead singer is muttering, or God forbid if I want want to learn the words to a song. No one’s going to sit there with the lyrics and say “OMG, now I have these AWESOME LYRICS, I ain’t gonna buy no CD!” Lyrics are practically free publicity, so they can just lay the fuck off.
What about when I play my crappy rendition of Imagine? I can guarantee no one would pay to listen to it and it wouldn’t sound *anything * like Lennon (in fact, I’m so bad at keeping a beat, it might not even flow with the lyrics), but does that mean I’m not allowed to play it? This has gone way too far.
duffer, when a band/music teacher teaches someone how to play a song, don’t they generally use sheet music or a music book that has been purchased for that purpose? And doesn’t some of that money find its way back to the original writer/composer of the music, or to the person to whom he legitimately sold the publishing rights? Isn’t the same thing true of the tab book you bought?
I don’t know exactly where the right and wrong is on this issue, but I can understand why songwriters and publishers wouldn’t want their work distributed in ways that deny them compensation.
Well, my first teacher just figured out the song by ear. When I teach I do the same thing unless there is a reason to go find a tab or sheet music, for example an extremely hard solo, and I only do that because it saves time.
They do produce a ton of tab books. How many they sell and how much these sites are cutting into their profits, I have no idea.
That depends on what you mean by “music teacher.” If you’re talking about a high school band or a college class or something, then yes, sometimes they use copyrighted, store bought sheet music. If you’re talking about the kind of informal guitar lessons I used to give, the no, hardly anyone buys sheet music. I always transcribed my own stuff and so has everyone else I’ve known who’s given lessons.
Their work isn’t being distributed by me teaching someone else how to play a song. Songwriters are only injured if someone tries to record their songs and make money without permission. There is no right to keep anyone from learning how to play them.
