the tabs aren’t their work. the tabs are the work of the author of the tab. besides, the only way to (possibly) get the an accurate (including all the technical details) is to BUY a tab book, and sometimes those aren’t even right.
on second thought, this paragraph looks all wrong. i need coffee.
They really are shooting themselves in the foot. They get a lot of royalties from cover bands playing those songs in clubs. Many of those musicians go online to find tab to learn them from.
As Diogenes said, “Professional” teachers will use store bought sheet music most of the time. Note: sheet music is not the same as tab music. I haven’t bought a tab book in over 15 years. My brother has always been able to play by ear, so for the past decade he’s just tabbed everything for me. Same as if I got it from a website. I don’t play for money, I play because I like getting 3 in-line distortion pedals hooked up and rattling the windows. (Well, OK. I don’t have 3 linked together, but that would be fucking awesome!)
So it gives me the opportunity to do something for myself just for the sake of doing it. Nobody is losing money. In fact, money IS being made by the guitar, amp, string, pedal and case manufacturers that the guitarists make damn good coin with in endorsements. If a guitarist has some problem with me playing his music, why the fuck should I buy a product he endorses, if I’m only supposed to use it to play my own original music? I’ll admit to being a talented sumbitch, but I couldn’t write an original tune to save my life. So if I can’t learn it, what’s the point in buying the equipment?
Yeah, yeah, the guitarist isn’t writing the rules. It’s the recording industry or whomever. If that’s the case, maybe the musicians will wake the fuck up and realize the bad blood they’re fostering by letting the execs run the industry.
Let’s take the situation in the OP’s article to the extreme. Some day GM may not allow you to teach your son how to change an air cleaner or install new spark plugs in his first car. It’ll cut into the money made by the dealerships. Improbable? Yes. Plausable? More than ever the way this shit is going.
Sometimes I think there are too many copyright attorneys. TAB guitar music, in rock, usually represents an effort made by somebody to explain, in satisfactory detail, how a guitar part was played on a (specific) recording. Officially published sheet music almost never gives you that. Published music usually consists of a piano part, lyrics, and guitar chords. A lot of rock music is still chordally so simple that having the music tell you what the chords are is zero help.
Moreover, the intended audience of TAB renditions consists:
[ul][li]entirely of guitaristsalmost entirely of guitarists who have already bought the CD, or have otherwise been listening to the music through legal channels—or else they wouldn’t be fired up to be trying to learn it[/li][/ul]
And I think mushc the same sort of thing seems to apply with lyrics too.
If I had any beef with lyrics sites it would be the pop-ups and spyware that accompanies a lot of them (I have proper protection against them, but not everybody does).
Discussion of the legal rules:
Are TAB sites legal?
It has been going on since the days of ftp.nevada.edu ~ 1992. IIRC, actions from EMI was the motivation for prepending disclaimers to the tabs.
I have the experience of which you speak :).
I wonder if it is illegal for me to put something like this on the web:
"How to play the solo from Some Well Known Guitar God Song,
Sixth string, fourteenth fret, 1/4 note, bend up 1/2 tone, hold for 1/2 bar and shake… etc"
The above contains the same information as TAB, the only difference is that TAB is a whole lot more convenient to read and write.
The music industry is making a big, big mistake. Access to tabs and lyrics makes music fans more invested in the future and livelihood of artists.
Add one more thing to the list of things the music industry doesn’t understand.
My personal theory is that the majority of the stewards of the music industry are focused on their own personal interests. They are concerned with short-term profitability – just long enough to get them to retirement. I suspect many of them have little interest in understanding digital-audio, lyrics-sites, and tab-sites. As a result, I have really minimized my interest in their products. I admit that I have no supporting evidence for my opinion and I am sure there are plenty of other possible explanations. It just seems that complacency, laziness, and selfishness are the most likely candidates.
In any case, I think tab and lyrics databases are small enough that they will continue getting mirrored. Since their content is text, they will also continue to get search-indexed. I hope it is always possible to google “You don’t bring me flowers” “tab” “chords” and find what I am looking for.
For people reading this that don’t read tab or music notation: Tabulature is NOT a recipe for a song. It is (at best) an outline. If you are not familiar with the song you are trying to learn, you are not going to learn it with tab alone. There is no rhythmic structure written into tab. It doesn’t matter if the tab comes from an “authorized” source or not.
IIRC a lot of these copyright issues started way, way back before the recording industry even began. People (even non-musician people) bought sheet music to use to hear the song in their head. Sure, people used the sheet music to play on the piano (or wahtever), but a lot of people didn’t need to do that. So the sheet music was considered a form of the music itself. And was an accurate enough depiction to be subject to copyright.
But Tabualature (tab) is a very pale shadow of the music it represents. If you give an (accurate) piece of tab to the best musician in the world, if they don’t already know the song, they won’t be able to reproduce it.
Lyrics? Well I think it sucks that the industry is so short-sighted and greedy, but the law is going to be on their side about lyrics.
It would be different if you buy just the lyrics for songs w/o buying the CD (and not all of them have lyrics). I might just want the lyrics and not the accompanying sheet music.
I don’t know. If the lyrics are copyrighted as part of a song, it might be possible to argue that they are such a small percentage of the song that their use is fair. Furthermore, they can be conversationally reproduced. Is it illegal to sing the song? Is it illegal to write the song down? Is it illegal to share the lyrics of the song to others, but not for profit?
Sorry. I forgot which forum I was in.
FUCK those soulless, money-grubbing, mindless shit-heels. They think just because they were shit out of some lucky uterus into a certain time and place they have the right to palm off whatever zombie-dicked, heartless piece-of-shit “image” their coke-whore boyfriends think is “hot” as art, while milking every last bit of bodily fluid out of an “oh-so-appreciative” public for every little spilled-semen-dribble of happiness we are able to glom onto. Well FUCK 'EM I say. FUCK 'EM FUCK 'EM FUCK 'EM!!
Is that better?
Keep in mind that this campaign is by the MPA (not the RIAA). The MPA derives significant revenue from selling sheet music, piano books, and tab books. They don’t care whether you own the CD and are familiar with the music. Their concern is that you might download tab instead of buying a royalty-paying tab book.
Downloading tab, like downloading MP3s, might generate interest in the artist and it might lead to you buying more CDs, but IMHO it is not very likely to lead you to buying a tab book. Sure, you might become interested enough in the artist that you want to play all of their songs, and all of the songs might not be tabbed for free, so you might buy a tab book – but that seems like an exception and not the rule.
Doesn’t seem likely considering artists continue to get permission from the publisher to include their own lyrics in their own linear notes – even when it is their own publishing company. Granted it may be a CYA-thing, but it is pretty prevalent.
Let’s be clear - the ‘music industry’ that’s up in arms about this is generally not the musicians, or the producers, or anyone else involved in actually creating the music. It’s the middlemen - the major record labels who have inserted themselves between musicians and audiences, make huge profits, and protect themselves through heavy donations to politicians to get laws passed in their favor.
Despite the fact that they are becoming largely irrelevant (or because of it), they are busy trying to exert as much control over the musical landscape as they possibly can. It’s not about protecting the artists - it’s about trying to shut down alternative distribution models and killing new ways for artists and consumers to come together.
There’s no need for record labels any more. Back in the bad old days, it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a record. Musicians couldn’t afford it, so labels signed them to often usurious contracts because they were the only game in town. And it was hellishly expensive to make LPs and CDs, and you couldn’t find an audience unless you were associated with a major label. So companies like EMI became hugely profitable, and had total control over the musical landscape.
But now, anyone can make a perfectly good CD in their basement with a few thousand bucks worth of recording gear. and artists can set up their own web sites and put their music on peer-to-peer download sites and connect directly with their audience.
This has the record labels running scared, and their response is to create a chilling effect on all these new forms of distribution and communication by A) getting increasingly restrictive laws passed in their favor, and B) litigating the living shit out of everything they can.
This is just another front in the war between an about-to-be extinct dinosaur and the tiny mammals that are trying to take its place.