Most of us remember what happened with recorded music.  After services (like Napster) that permitted people to share music for free were taken down by the RIAA, Apple launched its iTunes store with the blessing of the music industry (blessings are routinely granted in this business in exchange for a piece of the action).

The iTunes store had music from all of the major record labels and was organized in such a way that the music was easy to find.  At $.99 per track, the price was right too.  By June of this year, Apple had sold over 5 billion songs in iTunes.

When I started learning how to play the guitar, a good friend of mine recommended Olga.  At the time, Olga was the most popular service for finding guitar tablature.  Unfortunately, what I saw on the site was this:

“OLGA is currently offline while we attempt to resolve legal issues with the archive.

Read on to learn what has happened.

The most popular online tablature sites were threatened by the music
publishing industry with copyright infringement lawsuits.  Some, like
Olga.net, just chose to shut down.  Others, like Ultimate-Guitar.com,
claimed to move their operations to Russia to continue operating.

But in the last couple of years, there has been a proliferation of *legal* guitar tablature sites.  These sites offer tablature to users for a fee (and in one case for free) and share revenue with the music publishers.  The following are three worth watching:

1.  MusicNotes.  Musicnotes offers downloads of professional-quality tablature (and sheet music) for individual songs.  They have a lot of sheet music available (our search for Ray Lamontagne immediately turned up all of the songs from his first two albums) and we like the Scorch software which lets us hear what the music will sound like (in midi at least).  Pricing can be a bit aggressive.  $4.85 per song seems a little high.  Apple sold $5 billion worth of music at $.99 per song and five times the population of China seems to agree with us.

2.  Sheet Music Direct.  Sheet Music Direct also offers professional quality tablature and sheet music.  All of it is legal.  According to the company, “Sheet Music Direct is an official,
authorized and licensed service. Every sale on this site generates a royalty for the relevant publishers and songwriters.But there are two things about the site that we really like.  The first is that (at least as of today) they are running a huge promotion of Neil Diamond’s music.  The second is that their prices are a lot more reasonable.  We were able to find a lot of the music we wanted for $.99 - which feels like the right price for us.  They do, however, need an affiliate program to drive more sales.

3.  MXTabs.  MXTabs is taking a very different approach.  First of all, it isn’t distributing the professionally produced tablature available in books.  Rather, it is providing access to user-generated guitar tabs much like the ones available from the “rogue” free sites.  In addition, the company isn’t charging for tablature.  It is generating revenue from advertising on its website and sharing that revenue with the music publishers and ultimately the artists.  We like that it’s free and we think the advertising model could make a lot of sense.  We didn’t like that we did not get any resuts for our first two searches (Bob Dylan and Ray Lamontagne), but we did like that we did get some good tabs for Led Zeppelin and Beatles tunes.  The New York Times wrote a great story on the site last year.

Would you pay for tablature online and use one of these legitimate services?  Please let us know in the comments.

Relevant Links

MusicNotes

Sheet Music Direct

MXTabs