The End of Free Internet Guitar Tab?
For those of you who don’t know what “Guitar Tab(lature)” is, it is a less formal approach to reading music. Instead of notes on a staff, the tab shows a figure of the six guitar strings and shows you where to press your fingers on a string to achieve notes. The other intricacies of playing the song like tempo, volume, etc are up to the individual player and their interpretation.
Well, for as long as I can remember, tabs have been available free on websites because they were created by people who listened to songs and did what they could to try to emulate what they heard on albums. Now, this user-created content, might be illegal.
This is kind of a catch 22 type of case for me. I understand why the music publishing industry feels the way they do, and I also understand that they seemingly miss out on revenue due to the free tab trade. But, at the same time, I am an avid user of free guitar tab. Because of the way that Internet music fans are, you can find tablature for more obscure artists that would never be the subject of a songbook available for purchase in a store.
Hopefully the two sides will be able to reach a compromise so that tab sites pay a royalty to the publishers, and basically nothing else changes. This way the tab sites stay open, keeping the music popular for guitar players, but at the same time, the industry gets paid when these derivative works are created.
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These are basically sharing sites where individuals post their tab interpretations of the music as I understand it — my son complains a lot that some are way off the mark. Of course, if I copy something from the Led Zeppelin tab-book and post it as my own, I might have a problem. Sucks for all the guitar players out there.
Yeah… I love it for the times when I want to find out how to play something obscure like Mineral, or Sunny Day Real Estate, or before Death Cab was huge.
You could usually find someone with an interpretation which you can then at least build off of if it sounds wrong.
The tab sites cover the entire quality spectrum…many tabs are wildly inaccurate, and others are much better than the average purchased sheet music. I understand why the sheet music business is hurt by tabs, but this seems like pushing it to me. If I figure out a Pig Destroyer tab and email it to a friend, am I violating their copyright? What if I email it to 10 friends? Soon they’ll be handing out tickets if you hum a song while you’re walking down the street. The day can’t come soon enough that the earth cracks open and swallows these chuckleheads and their old and busted business model.