APC administrator27 June 2006, 6:41 AM
Take your hand off that guitar pick and back away slowly from the musical instrument. The Music Publishers Association is on the rampage again, this time attacking websites that host guitar tabs.
Ever since Napster turned up, piracy has been a regular point of discussion in the mainstream media.
Naturally, the music industry paints it as a struggle against organised crime syndicates, and the pirates paint themselves as revolutionaries fighting a fascist "machine".
Both groups are deluded, but that's another story.
The Music Publishers Association (MPA) thinks that P2P must be stopped, and is depriving their members of deserved income. I happen to agree to an extent, and don't condone this type of piracy in any way.
However, the latest move by the MPA to shut down sites which provide tablature (guitar specific sheet music listing fret and string positions rather than traditional notation) beggars belief. Lyrics sites were the last lot to be hit, so it was only a matter of time.
This onslaught by the MPA began late last year with a series of (their favourite weapon) cease and desist orders against sites which hosted "unauthorised" tabs. Sites such as Guitar Tab Universe and PowerTabs have been ordered to go through their catalogue and remove any tabs the MPA tells them to remove, and MXTabs has just closed their doors forever.
They did so voluntarily, claiming that it's because the MPA refuses to discuss tablature licensing schemes with them. Not surprising when you see some of the rhetoric the MPA is throwing around about jailing the owners of tab sites.
Reading the MXTabs farewell letter was a very sad experience for me. I remember when I was 14, and I went to the local supermarket and got a job just so that I could buy my first electric guitar and amp.
Now, of course this was before MXTabs, but the internet was still where I got my tabs from. I didn't have internet access at home, so it meant that my mate and I got to jam a lot over at his place. And that's how we learned to play guitar.
When I got older, I found the convenience and accuracy of buying a printed book of tablature to be more useful, so I started doing so. Still, even to this day I'll jump online and search for tabs when I want to learn a song that I can't find in any of my books.
What I'm getting at is that tabs are the greatest learning tool for a self-taught guitarist. By limiting access to tabs, the MPA is preventing the next generation of musicians from mastering their axes (unless they've got the $50+ it costs for a book of tabs).
So what's the justification?
"The Xerox machine was the big usurper of our potential income," he said. "But now the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we're taking a more proactive stance."
Okay, that sounds reasonable. Except that these sites aren't hosting scanned PDFs of copyrighted material. The tabs provided are usually worked out by a fan, sitting by themselves and working out how to play the song. As such, the sites in question usually provide multiple tabs for the same song, because it's impossible to know for sure which one is the truly correct interpretation.
Can you even copyright a tune? Longview by Greenday, Soul to Squeeze by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Tomorrow Wendy by Andy Prieboy and No Woman No Cry by Bob Marley all have the same chord progression - someone call the MPA!
Insanity from a group with too much money and a complete lack of morality. The sad thing is that musicians aren't a big enough group to fight this on our own; we need the support of the music lovers out there who don't want to see future generations of musicians kept from the resources they need to learn how to make your music.