aaron c beals

Back in the day, when I was in high school, I was one of the first of my friends to have Internet access, due to my involvement at Haystack Observatory. These were not the early days of the Internet, but they were certainly the early days of the World Wide Web. Before there were Google and Yahoo, there was Archie, which we used to search FTP archives.

Given that I was a budding guitarist, one of my favorites targets was “guitar tablature” (or “guitar tab”), which is basically homebrewed sheet music. It’s not a copy of real sheet music, but rather one person’s interpretation of what they hear — a transcription of their attempts to imitate the musical stylings of another. As you might expect, there is a healthy mix of good an bad interpretations; some are flat-out wrong while others are surprisingly accurate. But regardless of the quality of the tab, it provided a great starting point for your own intepretation of a song, especially if you were stuck on a particular solo or chord progression. Guitar tab was one of the primary tools in my arsenal during my formative years as a guitar player.

Eventually, guitar tab moved from FTP sites and newsgroups to collections on the web, the largest and most famous of which was the On-Line Guitar Archive (or OLGA). OLGA collected all the guitar tab and provided easy methods of browsing and searching the archive. A community grew up around the archive that cared for it and made sure the tab was of high quality. In general, OLGA did great things for armchair axe warriors everwhere.

Unfortunately, I speak of OLGA in the past tense, because for the forseeable future (as you might have noticed if you clicked on the link) OLGA is dead. The MPA (Music Publishers’ Association) deemed OLGA a threat to their intellectual property and requested the site be shut down. Clearly, they are concerned that I will release my version of “How to Save a Life” and put the much less talented members of The Fray out of a job. This must be the explanation.

From an IP (Intellectual Property) standpoint, this could be an issue of fair use, but the people writing the tabs are not copying sheet music. They are listening to a recording and trying to play what they hear. If anything, it’s reverse engineering. Which, of course, is illegal thanks to the abomination known as the DMCA.

Frankly, I think this is just another instance of the music industry shooting itself in the foot. Rather than getting young musicians excited about playing music (these are your next moneymakers, geniuses!), the MPA and NMPA are trying to squeeze every last penny out of them by making them pay for “official” transcriptions. Oh, and most smaller bands don’t have official sheet music because it’s too costly for the music industry to publish every song out there. Too bad for you.

Discuss.