by publius
Potential good news for guitar players – via the NYT, MusicNotes (an online music publisher) has struck a deal to make tablature available online legally and free under an ad-based business model. For me, it’s been maddening to see tab sites like OLGA dry up over the years as a result of our out-of-control copyright regime. The music industry’s assault on tablature hasn’t gotten the same press as file-sharing, but it actually provides a much stronger theoretical argument against overbroad IP law than digital music does.
To take a step back, the whole point of IP law (intellectual “property”) is to allow property-rights owners (writers, composers, music industry barons with Monopoly Man top hats and diamond-studded canes) to internalize the benefits of their creations. By doing so, it encourages people to continue creating. And that’s good policy, or so the argument goes.
IP scholarship, however, has questioned whether IP law is up to this task. The argument is that some types of protected works or products generate so many benefits to third parties (externalities) that IP law simply can’t capture all these benefits. As a result, property-rights owners cannot fully internalize the benefits in a market setting. Mark Lemley and Brett Frischmann (authors of the article “Spillovers”) explain:
Economists since Demsetz have viewed property rights as a way to internalize the external costs and benefits one party’s action confers on another. They have thought this internalization desirable, reasoning that if a party didn’t capture the full social value of her actions she wouldn’t have optimal incentives to engage in those actions. Measured by this standard, IP rights are inefficiently weak. There is abundant evidence that the social value of innovations far exceeds the private value. But there is also good evidence that, contrary to what economists might assume, these spillovers actually encourage greater innovation.
The basic point is that the more a given product or work generates innovation-producing externalities, the weaker the case for strong IP protections becomes. Remember that copyright law isn’t a Kantian (nihilist) principle — it should be judged entirely by its consequences. If strong copyright protections generate innovation, we should embrace them. If they don’t, we shouldn’t.
On a related note, this “spillover” argument provides a theoretical foundation for both net neutrality and an “immune” YouTube. Because both generate and facilitate an infinite amount of innovation, they create social benefits many times over what an individual copyright holder could command in the market. Thus, even though restricting them benefits the copyright holder, the protection comes at enormous social costs (lost innovation). In the net neutrality context, however, it’s hard to persuade people to worry about these costs because they require using abstract hypotheticals (e.g., — If AT&T does this, and if that action harmed the next YouTube inventor, and so on.).
Online guitar tabs, by contrast, provide a much better example of how strong IP protections can cause direct, concrete harm to real, concrete people. For those who don’t know, guitar tablature is “sheet music” for guitars. (You can see an example here). It’s not written in standard notation, but instead it replicates the fretboard with numbers.
Back before the day the music died, guitarists could find tablature for almost any song on the Internets on sites like OLGA. The content was provided by users – generally guitar players who figured out how to play a song by listening to it and then transcribing it. Darth RIAA, ruler of Mordor, however, prefers to sell these tabs to book publishers who sell them in music stores for a lot of money. So they’ve been systematically threatening these sites in the same way they’ve threatened music-sharing sites and file sharers. And they’ve been winning.
I don’t know what the benefits of applying copyright law this strongly to guitar tabs are, but the harms are clear. Most obviously, it reduces the number (and quality) of musicians in the world. Free guitar tabs online are how a lot of people (particularly unsalaried teenagers) learn to play guitar. It’s how I learned to play anyway.
Tablature is also an easy way for kids without music training to learn how to play guitar. It’s far easier to learn to read tabs than it is to read music (which requires formal education to be done right). If you’ve ever wondered why so many jackasses you know that are completely ignorant of music can play guitar so well, tablature is probably a big reason. It’s a low-cost, user-friendly way to musical proficiency. Call it a gateway drug to musical competence.
Tablature also helps aspiring bands. I’m better at this than I used to be, but it takes a long time to learn how to play a song by listening to it. Thus, when bands are getting started (e.g,. high school and college bands), they rely upon easily-accessible tablature to create their “sets.” Some of these bands go on to do big things. Others go to law school.
Thus, in light of tablature’s clientele, many of the social benefits that tablature creates cannot be captured in the market. If tablature were removed entirely from the Internet, I’m sure some people would go out and buy more tab books. But many people wouldn’t bother — particularly young people. They would either be worse musicians, or may not play at all. Again, the overall social costs far outweigh the benefits.
As you can tell, the music industry’s assault on tablature has been a pet peeve of mine for some time. But even if you don’t care about tabs or guitars, I do think it’s an issue that illustrates in a very concrete way the harms of modern copyright policy. So I look forward to the MusicNotes project. But I would prefer the ancien regime.
publius: You play guitar? This changes everything…
We could form a band. We could go on tour, sort of like the Rock Bottom Remainders, only for blogs.
The possibilities are endless…
done — though I get to be the Jason Lee character from Almost Famous. Russell was a dweeb
question:
what do you mean by “Kantian (nihilist) principle”? is this serious? ironic? i suspect the latter (especially after some googling turned up references to the cult of rand), so this is probably a dumb question. but still, would be intrigued to hear kant spun as nihilism (again, as long as it’s not an objectivist doing the spinning).
ok nevermind. found the reference. ask one silly question and, bam, i get myself mixed up with rightwing cartoonists.
it’s second only to blogofascist on the all-time greatest internet phrases list
Ooh, I play bass. Can I join the ObWi band? 😉
I wasn’t aware of the RIAA’s assault on tabs, mainly because I dropped out of playing music for a while (due to college — yeah, I’m backwards that way), but now that I’m trying to get playing again I’ve definitely noticed that good tabs seem harder to find.
For bass, though, I prefer proper sheet music. And that is simply impossible to get on the internet.
The RIAA and MPAA are the two most vile organisations on the planet. They’re dismantling our culture, and nobody even cares because they think the only people affected are punk kids who want to steal movies. Uh… no. The *AAs practise legal carpet bombing, and they don’t care what the consequences of their actions are as long as they can find a modest uptick in their and their clients’ income.
One more thing for our generation to be ashamed about when our grandkids ask about life back in the Aughts.
oo oo! i play guitar, too. and i’ve written about the tab situation.
rockers unite!
Lemley was a great prof.
The IP regime in this country is out of control, in part because of Disney’s lobbying and in part because it’s about the only thing we’re a net exporter of.
I completely agree with you, but I also can’t say it’s been a huge problem for me. Guitar tabs for almost any rock song seem to still be readily available all over the net if you do a minimum of searching. Quality is hit or miss though – I suppose if the persecution stopped, more guitarists might be inclined to post better tabs.
I don’t know squat about the topic (tabs) but the RIAA holds a special place in my darkest of hearts so I am with you on this.
Long before iTunes etc. some friends and I formed a small technology company. Our main “product” was streaming music over the Internet. It was essentially a jukebox where you could search for music you liked and build a play list. It was web based but had a lot of features you find in MP3 players today. We thought we were 100% legal in that we had a licensing agreement with EMI. It was based on the same model that they use for radio stations. Essentially we had to submit server logs to them to verify what songs people were listening to and pay them fees based on that. An important feature was that you could only listen; you could not save the music locally.
About the time we started to be successful in terms of building up a base of regular users the RIAA started sending us C&D letters. Even though we had a licensing agreement and were paying royalties, their contention was that we could not license based on the radio station model because users could select what they wanted to hear vs. us pushing out pre-selected play lists.
Long story short – as with so many others we caved and threw in the towel as we simply could not afford the legal fees to fight them.
OCSteve,
Are you out of Seattle? A friend of mine was involved in a similar project a few years ago. As I recall, he tried to avoid that by serving only independent music, had one in the Sit and Spin (a laundramat bar), among other places. I have not tracked where it went.
jrudkis: Nope. East coast. And this was a while ago. We actually tried to switch to a product for unsigned artists but the RIAA business had pretty much killed us and it died a quiet death.
When it comes to music, IP law is a crime against humanity. The laws benefit .01% of musicians and hurt most of the rest. And they make the business what it is. They also make finding good music a drag for listeners.
And every musician I’ve ever known only cares about getting the widest audience possible to hear and dig what they play, regardless of $$ (… that, and, when possible, sex and quality drugs too!).
There was just a story on NPR yesterday about guitarists on YouTube posting free instructional videos. One guy was demonstrating the opening riff from Sweet Home Alabama, thus violating, in the minds of some, copyright law. (Maybe not the guy himself, if he wasn’t profiting from it, but YouTube. I’m not sure.)
(I still suck at the guitar. I should start using tabs more, instead of sitting around running through pentatonic scales in some sad attempt at blues improvisation.)
Hair,
Same three riffs for the last 25 years? I thought you were cranking it out by now.
yes — that’s the best way to learn. every song you learn via tabs (and some “tabs” are just chords) teaches you a new trick. you’ll progress much faster re: blues improv by learning clapton songs (and thus his “tricks”) than abstract scales.
plus, scales are boring. learning it via a song is more fun.
that said, you do eventually have to go back and learn the scales or you’ll hit a plateau. but if you’re just starting, learn chords and learn songs and let the rest come.
In a totally off-topic request, do we have any credit or privacy lawyers in the house? I just had a credit card closed on me and the damn company refuses to tell me why except that I have a “derogatory public record” which, having seen my credit report, is simply untrue. It’s true that I had paid late on that card on multiple occasions — never more than a month, but still late — but that’s not the reason they gave.
The problem continues thusly: they refused to furnish me with the exact nature of this “derogatory public record” even after I specifically authorized them to, and even after two customer service representatives agreed that that wasn’t the reason for the closure. [The third disagreed, obviously.] They also refused to tell me the exact title of the “Federal Law” — the third guy repeated this about ten times, in an increasingly annoying fashion — that prevented me from requesting the information, only that it was “some part of the Fair Credit Act, but possibly some amendment to it”. Any thoughts?
I’ve been watching this tabulature issue out of the corner of my eye (I engineer, produce [funky word for giving unsolicited opinions], play some guitar and sing for a mostly moribund band) and this is a good post.
I hope the issue is resolved. Thanks, Publius
But, I find the entire online tablature industry to be a strange, inefficient animal. I wish bands would provide tablature for their own songs, as many do with lyrics, along with their cds. Maybe the tablature could be encoded into the cd and displayed on a screen.
Many online tabs are pretty lame and it’s a huge waste of time to figure out which of, say, eight tabs, is accurate. Especially if the song is played in a different tuning.
Alternatively, maybe OCSteve could invent a device which could scribe a tablature just from listening to the song.
My virtuoso guitar-playing friend can figure out just about any song by ear, which he learned to do back in the vinyl turntable days — moving that needle 612 times back to the lick. I started late and never developed that discipline — I just want to learn as many songs as possible as quickly as possible before it’s too late.
i’ve looked at a few of those ‘instructional’ clips on YouTube, trying to learn tricks like hi-speed alternate picking and various Buckethead thingys, but haven’t found a single one that wasn’t exactly like this:
1. guy plays the thing really fast
2. guy says, it’s easy, you just do [this], but faster
3. guy plays the thing really fast, again
high-jumping: it’s just like jumping into bed, but higher!
cleek: So most of the “instructors” are just looking for a way to show off without looking like they’re showing off, right? Why don’t they just go Malmsteen and show off with wild abandon?
jrudkis: There are more than 3, and I can play them faster and with more expression. And it hasn’t been 25 years.
That paper on spillover gave me a few thoughts.
How might Game Theory, along the lines of the Nash Equilibrium, apply to IP?
How might one evaluate the externalities of, say, Newton’s development of Mechanics? I’m sure he hasn’t internalized all the benefits of that one.
I was also reminded of a night many, many, oh so many years ago spent with some friends under the influence of, well, an ingested fungus. At any rate, we were in my parents house picking up various objects like lamps or ashtrays, trying to decide what it was about these things that made them belong to my stepfather. (For those who haven’t ingested the type of fungus we had, these types of thoughts are found to be at once highly humorous and somewhat profound for a number of hours after ingestion.) This led to a discussion about ideas. “If I have an idea and I tell you about it, I can’t take it back from you. Is it still my idea? Now you can give it to anyone you want, and we’ll all have it.” It’s not far off from some of the ideas presented in the paper, scarcity-wise.
So most of the “instructors” are just looking for a way to show off without looking like they’re showing off, right?
yep. that’s the feeling i got.
Why don’t they just go Malmsteen and show off with wild abandon?
oh there are thousands of videos of people doing that. you can find clips of schoolgirls playing country songs, Japanese guys playing Bach on multiple guitars simultaneously, endless clips of guys trying to duplicate every lick ever recorded, some with bags on their heads, in dorm rooms, on the porch, at the beach, etc..
it can be handy, if you want to learn a particular song – get the tab and watch someone else play it over and over. which means those clips will need to be taken down, too.
Does anyone perchance have a legal standard that would distinguish between tablature and “music-written-down” in general? Or are we arguing for exempting all sheet music from IP law?
Because I don’t think “Ok, there’s no IP protection for stuff written in tablature, but there is for stuff with a staff on it” is going to be a workable distinction.
Its not enough to point out that a legal rule has a downside, and then to claim that repealing that rule would eliminate that downside. You have to point out a better rule that would have fewer, other, downsides.
Excellent post Publius, and I completely agree that a cost / benefit analysis is the only way forward when it comes to IP (along with most property law).
I would add that, certainly in the UK, magazines publish tabs as well and are less expensive than the tab books, but that doesn’t really detract from your point.
The problem is that this really is one of those policy decisions which should be left to the legislature, not the judiciary. And to get the kind of common sense revision you desire, you would have to persuade the legislature to act against the interests of the very richest in favour of the vast majority…
Ha! You youngsters. Back in the heady pre-internet days, we learning musicians had to go shell out $3.95 at the newsstand every month for Guitar for the Practicing Musician, breathlessly waiting for tabs for another Quiet Riot or AC/DC masterpiece. One month they printed a song by REM and my head nearly exploded.
I just wish more of the folks uploading tabs would learn the difference between major and minor chords, or learn to hear the difference between I and vi, or learn that Bb is not a common chord change in the key of G.
John T.: But, I find the entire online tablature industry to be a strange, inefficient animal. I wish bands would provide tablature for their own songs, as many do with lyrics, along with their cds.
Fond memories of college radio: On the CD single for “Chemical World,” Blur printed the lyrics along with chord changes on the back cover, Which was cool, because it’s actually a neat chord progression.
i also like blur’s chord progression in “coffee and tv.” it’s their best song, but i wasn’t crazy about the album (13, i think it was)
or learn that Bb is not a common chord change in the key of G.
Feh. Give me a juxtaposed C# major/A minor chord, or whatever the hell it is Gesualdo does in Vinea Mea Electa. Now that’s music.
[If you haven’t heard Gesualdo’s Tenebrae, btw, run out and grab yourself a copy. Nothing has ever been written like, before or since.]
Phil:
The John Lennon Acoustic CD issued a couple of years ago includes tabs for the songs with chord diagrams, you Beatle person you.
I agree that the externalities of IP are an important consideration that should be addressed in law, and that the law is currently distorted in favor of big IP owners. However, I’d like to add two points:
1. The economy is steadily moving towards a regime in which IP is the primary form of wealth. We will definitely want a legal regime to address the new complexities of such an economy. That includes some protections for IP holders.
2. I would favor a system that provides reduced length of ownership. The fact that Disney still owns Mickey Mouse after all these years is an outrage. The difficulty is that different kinds of IP require different lengths of ownership to be effective. Music is one area in which ownership could safely be limited to a few years. At the other extreme we have the area of patents; some technologies (for example, new medicines) are extremely expensive to develop and require lots of time to earn back their investment. The killer problem, as I see it, is determining how to provide different lengths of ownership for different kinds of IP.
Sorry, my bad: I was thinking the Tristis Est Anima Mea, which can be found here. It’s the second track on the first disc (Feria V – In Coena Domini: In I Nocturno: Responsorium 2). It has the single most astonishing progression of chords I’ve ever heard; I remember that I was slicing onions the first time I heard it and I damn near took my finger off.
…not that this has anything to do with guitar tablature, of course, it’s just that wacky chromaticism can work if you’re genius enough 😉
Phil, back in the pre-internet days, I thought we figured out all the chords ourselves, and went into music stores that sold the books to check only when we couldn’t figure out the chords on our own. Of course, that only worked for songs popular enough to be in books in music stores.
Back in the pre-internet days we, for values of ‘we’ equal to ‘me’, also spent years looking for specific songs, and (when unsuccessful) made up new versions of them that sort of sounded right, but never were. There are some songs I still haven’t yet found, I assume because my version and the normal version diverged too far for googling to work.
it can be handy, if you want to learn a particular song – get the tab and watch someone else play it over and over. which means those clips will need to be taken down, too.
Yeah, cause lord knows if learn to play Sweet Home Alabama, it’s all over for Lynyrd Skynyrd and their record company.
it’s all over for Lynyrd Skynyrd and their record company.
low-quality amateur tab is killing music !
Off Topic: My my my,
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
But they had probable cause for the arrest you see, the war protesters were wearing black.
Even more OT: a woman just got shot in the CNN HQ in Atlanta.
You can’t fight the ultra-powerful Guitar Player Magazine lobby. Without tabs, it’d just be a monthly Zakk Wylde pictorial.
If indeed the band is ‘getting back together’, I have a few chops. Also, I can make a hammered dulcimer gently weep.
So, knowing nothing about the topic but wanting to chime in, perhaps the answer to tabs not being protected while sheet music can be is that it is in effect reverse engineering the product and coming up with a new way for the same function, like apparently happened with IBM’s BIOS. If you have it in an identical form, it is copying, if you find a new method to play the same song, it is innovation.
What I’ve never understood about the attempts to make TAB into some sort of infringement is that it makes teaching illegal as well. How are you going to distinguish between:
(1) Hearing a song and figuring it out for yourself.
(2) Hearing a song, wanting to learn it, realizing that it’s beyond your current ability to figure it out for yourself, and thus taking a recording of the song to your guitar teacher, who figures it out for himself and teaches you how to play it. (A vital part of the teaching process.)
(3) Going online and finding someone who’s willing to do the above for you, except presumably for free.
If online TAB is illegal, then how are instructors supposed to teach their students songs unless they teach them from the officially published transcriptions?
Thanks, Publius. Another guitar player here (and I even play left-handed!).
I always wondered about the legality of the challenges on posting tabs. It’d be one thing to copy them from a book. But when someone’s figured out the chord progression or fingering themselves? Wouldn’t that be comparable to posting a recipe, really? Also, let’s be honest – most store-bought song books had crappy or over-simplified chords listed. The genuine tab version books used to be few and far between, hard to find, and generally slim and expensive, if worth it for a beloved tune it was hard to crack on one’s own.
I often try to work out the tabs of songs I like myself, but OLGA was great – even though some progressions listed were badly off, many were fantastic, and clearly the product of geek-fanboy-fangirl love. I always have to back that. 😉
Yeah, I don’t understand how this stands up at all, has it just never been legally challenged?
Seems similar to, say, reverse-engineering software, which is perfectly legal.
I don’t see you distinguish between reverse-engineered tabs and reverse-engineered sheet music. For that matter, do you think it should be okay to “reverse-engineer” an audio book by transcribing it and posting the text on a website?
I do a reasonably decent Louis Armstrong impersonation, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how that has any place in any sort of rock band, bloggy or otherwise…
Patrick raises an interesting question, but the position he takes up can be taken to absurd levels (actually I think it already has been by the whole tablature thing). He wrote, “Does anyone perchance have a legal standard that would distinguish between tablature and “music-written-down” in general? Or are we arguing for exempting all sheet music from IP law?
Because I don’t think ‘Ok, there’s no IP protection for stuff written in tablature, but there is for stuff with a staff on it’ is going to be a workable distinction.”
I don’t think anybody was arguing for exempting all sheet music from IP law, though I think a good argument can be made for exempting sheet music transcribed by someone learning a song by ear, as is the case with most tablature. Let’s say, though, that somebody were to develop another way to write music for guitar, something like, say Gs(tring)7f(ret), etc., and transcribe music by ear using that. Should RIAA be able to restrict that as well?
Even for pay, online or in music stores, TAB music is still difficult or impossible to find for most songs. Free TAB online publishing or publishing of other alternate means of writing down music for those of us who just can’t learn to read sheet music competently don’t threaten the IP that copyright law was intended to protect; they actually serve the underlying purpose of copyright law, facilitating the spread of the creative property to the advantage of the creator.
Phil, back in the pre-internet days, I thought we figured out all the chords ourselves, and went into music stores that sold the books to check only when we couldn’t figure out the chords on our own.
Yeah, that too. What really stank is when you would go to the store to check your work, only to find out that the music publisher had transposed the song to a more piano-friendly key, and if you hadn’t yet grasped some theory basics and the Roman numeral method of notation, you had no idea what was going on. (Again, “you” meaning “me.”) That happened to me with many a song.
That Blur tab I linked to above is a perfect example of what I was talking about with online tabs, too, when the transcriber writes: note: an alternative for A/Ab is A7 (I think) which is : x02120
That’s Amaj7, son. A7 at that point in the harmony would be the aural equivalent of stubbing your toe.
Phil: even worse (better) is when you finally get a song right that requires pretzeling your fret-hand but you’re all proud of it, then you check the ‘official’ tabs and find out it’s in some alternate tuning and all the frets are just barred.
Damn you Ani Difranco!
“A7 at that point in the harmony would be the aural equivalent of stubbing your toe”
But that’s the blues!
Damn you Ani Difranco!
damn you Nick Drake! BEBEBE isn’t a tuning!
Russell was a dweeb
I get that a lot.
Regarding the tablature thing:
Tab are more or less equivalent to sheet music. It’s a notation for what notes to play to play a song.
If RIAA or anyone else wants to copyright that stuff and prevent people from passing them around for free, fine. Most working musicians will still be able to grab it by ear. Students will just find another way to make the information available.
Playing music is a pretty fundamental human activity. Nobody is going to build a fence around it, no matter how hard they try.
Bach sneaked Pachelbel scores out of his brothers bookshelves and copied them by moonlight. I know folks who have spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours listening to recordings over and over, watching videos, attending performance after performance, and transcribing stuff note for note to pin down every little nuance of some musical hero’s style. Tab’s nice, but if you really want it, you’ll find another way to get it.
If the RIAA want to lock down tablature, I say God bless their chiseling little hearts. Folks that want to pay for the tabs will pay. Lots of other folks will just bootleg them. Making copies for purposes of pedagogy, BTW, is a well established exception to copyright law.
Either way, folks that want to play music will find a way to figure it out.
The only thing I’d ask is that, if anyone makes money off of this, the musicians who actually played the original part get a cut.
Thanks –
The only thing I’d ask is that, if anyone makes money off of this, the musicians who actually played the original part get a cut.
Amen to that.
Wait a sec. Surely this can’t actually be legally enforceable?
I’m a foreigner so I don’t pretend to know much about American IP law, but isn’t there an old old precedent about methods vs implementation? I thought that’s why SCO vs IBM was getting no traction – because if you do the same thing but in a different way (coding, musical interpretation, whatever) then it was safe-ish. Or did the “Under Pressure” lawsuit put that one to bed?
I can’t see how this could be enforceable without lawsuits bankrupting anybody who’s ever performed anything composed since Mozart or Beethoven. Of course, enforceable doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with bullying smaller parties out of the game with threats of costly legal proceedings.
that last sentence is the key
The German organization that collects the fees for using copyrighted music (GEMA) recently tried to include whistling in public in the list of “performances” that would require paying (they obviously dislike whistleblowers as much as Dubya&Accomplices do 😉 ).
Mozart wrote down a complete sacred choral work after just hearing it once. Direct copying was threatened with excommunication. Quite a problem for the copyright lawyers of then 😉
cleek: See also, “The Collected Works of Sonic Youth.” When they tour, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo each have a rack of 15-20 guitars, each with a strip of tape on the back of the head noting the tuning that it’s in. Yikes.
But that’s the blues!
Yeah, but Blur is everything but bluesy!
I don’t see you distinguish between reverse-engineered tabs and reverse-engineered sheet music. For that matter, do you think it should be okay to “reverse-engineer” an audio book by transcribing it and posting the text on a website?
IANAL, but surely the concept of performance is the key distinction? I don’t need to interpret spoken text. I would think a Cliffnotes version of a book is more comparable to tabs of a song.
Anarch–the stuff you mentioned was also I bet originally for lute.
Maybe we should go find some descendents of John Rowland and Thomas Robinson and help them counter-sue anyone who makes a fuss about tabulature.
Lots of great points and dialogue here.
I completely agree with the angle that learning songs and transcribing tab is basically reverse engineering music.
I draw the distinction perhaps with this analogy. Direct copying of a binary file would be copyright infringement, while using code you thought up to create the same resulting file would not be. The former in no way helps you become a better programmer (or guitarist in the analogy). It only lets you enjoy someone’s hard work for free with no benefit other than hedonism. The latter does help you understand what steps the creator took to create his product, thus empowering you to do likewise with your own.
For god sake’s, every chord progression has been used and run into the ground. Every musician steals and scavenges by nature. It’s the blend of influences and the magic of the performance that has the most true value, and you can’t steal that.
I wish the music industry would stop opposing so much and rather innovate once in a while. Use the tab, youtube, and digital music files for all I care to promote the LIVE performance, and make all your money there. I can’t stand well produced recording lab engineered pop stars who make you vomit if you ever have to hear them live (technical meltdown during lip sync?).
I hated paying for tab books only to find them inaccurate. If you want me to pay for them, give me a guarantee from the artist that every note and fingering was transcribed accurately. Add some value, like extra pics, maybe a free signed pick, or even a disc with a video of the artist himself teaching me. Now, that I would gladly pay for.
If it’s amateur tab, why should I pay?
I think the music industry owes us money (kind of like slave reparations) for all the times they either beat us over the head with a single on the radio until we totally hated the song, whether it was a good song originally or not, in addition to the the times we paid 16 or 17 bucks for a cd that had 2 good songs and 10 or 11 that SUCKED!! (Total filler tracks) That industry stole from us for years. It’s funny how they don’t like it when we reverse the game on them.
Trust me. I love music, and a well written song is the most amazing thing in the world. We should cherish and nurture the creators of the world. However, knowledge was never increased by shutting down libraries in favor of book stores. Let’s not take that approach with such a wonderful art form.
Thanks for listening.