I was watching a video of Michael Angelo Batio after somebody reached my site looking for some of his guitar tabs and I was just wondering: why would you need Michael Angelo Batio guitar tabs?

You would probably not be able to do anything with them. I think that no matter how many guitar tabs you will have from Michael Angelo himself, you will not be able to shred the way he does. He did it his whole life and beside that he plays with his both hands at the same time so…

Later edit: it sounded bad. I meant to say that it is not easy to play both hands, if not impossible (for me). If you can do it, you have all my respect. If you can do it the way Michael Angelo Batio does it, then you must be great, so send me a CD and a couple of tickets to your concerts, I will be there!

Anyway, this is not a reason for you to stop trying, just that you should not put all your trust in these guitar tabs you find on the internet! Instead, practice, practice and again…practice!

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If you love electric guitars or acoustic guitars, you surely know what guitar tabs are. If you don’t know, you need to find out, since they started to become a matter of great dispute these days.

So, what guitar tabs really are?

For those of you that don’t know what they are, guitar tabs are a form of musical notation for the guitar. Instead of writing down the notes on a classical way, guitar tabs represents the notes as positions on the 6 strings of the guitar. This way, beginner guitar players find it easy to learn a song by learning where they should put their fingers on the guitar neck. It is way easier than by reading music in the classical way.

Why guitar tabs have became a matter of dispute

Well, as almost anything it moves in the land of music business, guitar tabs are considered a kind of copyrighted materials, a transcription, a copy of a song, so if a song is copyrighted, so is any copy of it and so are guitar tabs.

This is actually what National Music Publishers Association considered when they sent an email to one of the biggest guitar tabs resource site on the internet, asking them to close any activity regarding distribution of such musical transcription.

There are many sites that distribute guitar tabs all over the internet; some of them are very famous and a lot of beginner guitar players visit them regularly in order to learn a song or two.

The fact is that as far as I know, 30% of the revenue of NMPA come from selling guitar tabs so such websites distributing them for free on the internet hurt their revenue because people will go and download them for free instead of paying to get them from the official source. So, as usual, the main reason for such disputes is the money flow.

Some of you may know the mother of all guitar tabs website, Olga.net (Online Guitar Archive). Olga has been online since 1992 and they reported 1.9 million visitors a month before lawyers representing two US groups: the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) and the Music Publishers Association of the United States (MPA) sent them a particular letter, asking them to remove all 34.000 guitar tabs they offered for free on the internet, which they did and close the business. Well, as Cathal Woods, the person running the site said, Olga.net was not a business, but more of a website that managed to get the money for the hosting and other small monthy expenses and that was about all. But others are real businesses, so they have a lot of money to lose.

I have seen a few weeks ago, somewhere on the internet that a particular website that I am not going to name here since I don’t remember which one it was exactly, chosed an other method of overcoming this situations: sharing the revenue with the music business industry. It’s a solution, to live on, in the end.

So, are all guitar tabs sites going to be closed in the near future?

To be honest, I don’t think so. The reason for which I don’t think that all those websites will be closed down to the last one is the fact that they are distributed all over the world, so not all are USA or Canada based. Some of them are based in countries where USA music business industry doesn’t have such power so I don’t think they will be able to close those websites down, or at least not in the near future. This is a cool overview of the movement that affects the guitar tabs websites, I don’t judge id this initiative is good or bad, I don’t say that websites distributing free guitar tabs are right or that the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) and the Music Publishers Association of the United States (MPA) are right. I just look at the facts from a distant point of view.

Anyway, I guess we will just wait and see what is going to happen.

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