Music industry threatens guitar tablature sites

First it was services that provided music, then it was sites that offered lyrics. Now the music industry has trained its legal guns upon guitar tablature, and several of them have already been shuttered.

Last December, the Music Publishers' Association (MPA) chose to take action against web sites that posted either sheet music or tablature (a simplified form of notation used by guitarists) in order to "protect the interests of the creators and publishers of music so that, [sic] the profession of songwriting remains viable and that new and exciting music will be continued to be created [sic] and enjoyed for generations to come."

The MPA represents businesses that make money from the creation and sale of sheet music and tablature. If, as I did last week, you've ever walked into a music store and look at a note-for-note transcription of a Beatles album, you'll have a good idea of what these firms sell. They're understandably unhappy about trying to compete with free tablature available on the Internet, especially when people rip off their work and post it online (most tabs are user-created, but such copying does happen).

In response to the campaign, the MPA admits that it received many letters and e-mails from concerned music fans, and that many of these people talked about their frustration with the fact that the Internet was the only place to get tabs of most songs. The MPA says that "it is the presence of the unauthorized free product that is largely to blame for that situation," implying that once it rids the Internet of the scourge of sheet music piracy, guitarists will be awash in a sea of accurate transcriptions.

The campaign has already had notable success. "Guitar Tab Universe" went dark back in July after receiving a letter from attorneys hired by the MPA and the National Music Publishers' Association. Manager Rob Balch wonders where the line should be drawn between infringement and simply figuring out how to play a song. "When you are jamming with a friend and you show him/her the chords for a song you heard on the radio, is that copyright infringement?" he asks. "What about if you helped him/her remember the chord progression or riff by writing it down on, say, a napkin... infringement? If he/she calls you later that night on the phone or e-mails you and you respond via one of those methods, are you infringing?"

Now one of the largest tab respositories in the world has taken down its archive. The Online Guitar Archive (better known as OLGA) also received a letter back in June, and has recently gone dark. The site suffered a similar outage nearly a decade ago after threats from the Harry Fox Agency, but reappeared a short time later. Now the site is down again, and all visitors can access is a link to the letter.

And the music industry's war of attrition continues. It has even gone worldwide.

While the MPA may be well within its legal rights here (and it seems as though they are), it's less clear that the campaign in general is a good idea. As someone who learned to play the guitar before ever learning to send an e-mail, I might point out that the tablature situation for guitarists was never ideal. While billions upon billions of accurate transcriptions of my favorite bands no doubt existed on shelves somewhere, the most important shelves for my purposes were the ones at the local music center. These were well-stocked, but still never had more than a couple dozen books, meaning that if you wanted music for some band that you loved but which had not yet cracked the top 50, you were out of luck.

While I can understand the frustrations of sheet music publishers, the people who want to play these songs are fans. They want to learn a band's songs. That's the sort of popularity most groups would kill for, and it's not clear that alienating this group of fans is ultimately good for musicians. Music publishers might do a bit better, but the musicians who license their rights need to be aware of what these groups are doing on their behalf.