I remember back in the late 90s the tab scene was exploding online, with the biggest tab site being Harmony Central. Then, around the time Napster came under fire, tab sites started getting shut down and sued. Harmony Central pretty much died and then for a few years it became hard to find newly tabbed songs.
That shutdown only lasted a few years and now there are tons of massive websites with huge tab repositories. Many of the songs completely reconstructed in Guitar Pro or Pro Tab.
What’s the story here? What changed that allowed the tab sites to flourish again? I think the same thing goes for lyrics websites though I don’t use those so I can’t be sure.
There do seem to be a number of big tab websites that seem to be able to stay afloat, and I’m not sure why - I’ve also seen plenty of high quality smaller tab sites, youtube channels providing tutorials/covers, etc. shut down due to threats from copyright holders - frankly I save a local copy of anything I come across that I’d miss if it disappeared because I’ve seen it happen many times.
I was wondering the same thing, especially since, just for the heck of it I was checking out how OLGA is doing these days. OLGA was actually one of the first websites (no, not just TAB websites, I mean websites) that I became aware of (ca. 1995). So, since they’re still down and displaying a legal take-down letter, the real question is: what’s going on with OLGA?
I haven’t looked in a long while but I thought the big ones still online were hosted outside the USA, which makes it harder to get them taken down depending on the country doing the hosting.