Guitar Tab Blog

Not directly TAB related, but Pandora is a free music source for everytype or music under the sun and has now been hit by license problems from the hard-faced music copyright industry that bans the U.K from using this enterprising service.

Pandora.com is a new kind of Internet radio that only plays the music you like. It is a great system that works the following way:

You type in a song or an artist you like, it will then play similar tracks not only basedon genre but based on time signatures, vocal styles, instrument bases and a lot more. Its an increbible system and it’s totally free. Well things just got bad for listeners outside of the U.S …

Pandora has lost the ability to stream music to the U.K. For a while on their interface they have had a message advising only available to U.S however from the 15th of January 2007 it will be blocked by IP address to the U.K entirely. Below is the email sent from Tim Westergren, Pandora founder. You know its not going to be good when it starts “This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.”.

“This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Based upon the IP address from which you recently visited Pandora, it appears that you are listening from the UK. If you are, in fact, listening from the US, please contact Pandora Support: pandora-support@pandora.com.

It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don’t often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent - and by that I mean both well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans. As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.

We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off, non-negotiable…so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.

We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.

We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora and remain hopeful that at some point we’ll get beyond this. We’re going to keep fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora back to you. We’ll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK. There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no choice but to turn off service to the UK.

Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.

Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I’m very, very sorry.”

Warm Regards,
Sir P
PS: Please feel free to leave your comments and if you have not checked out Pandora, do so at
http://www.pandora.com

Hello all, a very long time coming with this latest entry - the blog was actually down for a long lenght of time whilst all sorts of server moves took place. We are back now.

O.K many of you have heard that MXTabs is planning to be back this summer, and legal! MXTabs was due backup already however has been delayed due to diffilculties it’s been having securing the legality of all of its music.

MXTabs officially posted on their blog:
“The site is coming along nicely, and is pretty much ready to go up. The reason we haven’t been able to is mostly due to the fact that we’re still working with the publishers to secure licenses for all the music. As we mentioned previously, quite a few publishers are already signed up… but we’re still working with a few other big ones to finish up all the legal paperwork to get everything in place.”

This leaves myself hopefull that a happy resolution will soon be fetched and one of the all time great tablature sites will be back up with us - I do also still worry that due to MXTabs doing it the right way, the number of Tablatures available will drop increbibly. Though if they cut out half of the spam tabs they had on their before, a victory for the online tab world.

Best of luck, MXTabs!
Regards,
Sir P

A very brief one today, not got alot of time to write at the moment however I found a quote on a once thriving, no closed tab website from Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and was touched. I thought I would share it with you.

“So lots of respect for all you boys and girls
out there who tab out songs like all the time.
You bring rock and roll music
closer to the people.”

Gratefully yours,

Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth / Guitars, Vocals

The MPA and NMPA have sent letters to two well known tablature websites now, one of which was OLGA.net. These letters documented which tabs specifically broke copyright laws.

Tab-Archive.com has removed the prementioned tracks from its online archives. Infact, to be totally safe it has removed all tabs for every artists mentioned.
The artists are:

and ..

These artists are currently unavailable on tab-archive.com and may soon be unavailable across the entire web!

OLGA.net was the first tablature site online, and has now been threatened with a ‘take-down’ letter by lawyers working for the MPA and NMPA.

OLGA sound confident they will return, and as they have been threatened by lawsuits many times in the past, I’m confident they are right.

OLGA had this to say …
“We greatly appreciate your support and hope to return to providing resources to the aspiring guitarist as soon as possible. Contact rcwoods for more information. In the meantime, we recommend the usenet newsgroups rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature and alt.guitar.tab.”

OLGA kindly published they letters that had been sent to them online, for us all to read. Which you can find on the links below.
http://www.olga.net/060621-nmpa-p1of6.jpg
http://www.olga.net/060621-nmpa-p2of6.jpg
http://www.olga.net/060621-nmpa-p3of6.jpg
http://www.olga.net/060621-nmpa-p4of6.jpg
http://www.olga.net/060621-nmpa-p5of6.jpg
http://www.olga.net/060621-nmpa-p6of6.jpg

What is most interesting is that in the 6th letter there is a list of songs that are copyrighted and need to be removed from the OLGA website, I’m curious to see if OLGA.net remove these and remain open as currently they are not providing any tablature at all.

Best of luck to OLGA.net from GuitarTabBlog.com

A fair few people were happy to believe that the proposed action by the MPA was just a bluff, however as of the 10th of August, just last week, that seems far from the truth.

I’m sad to report that the MPA have now gained support from national publisher agency’s and have published news informing of this. Furthermore they have asked their national counterparts to proceed in following up any sites that had not closed after being sent ‘CAD’ letters, asking them to stop serving tabs with immediate effect.

August 10, 2006 - Worldwide Music Publishers’ Associations Pledge Support for MPA’s Actions Regarding Unauthorized Publication of Sheet Music and Tablature

In June of 2006, the campaign was pushed forward exponentially through MPA’s partnership with the National Music Publishers’ Association. Both the NMPA and MPA are currently moving forward in the issuance of notice and takedown letters to infringing Web site owners as well as Internet service providers.
- Press release from http://www.mpa.org


Another sad day for the tab world …
Your’s faithfully,
Sir P

Tab-Archive.com next to close?

http://www.tab-archive.com is not a massive site, it is only small-fry when compared to site such Ultimate-Guitar, MXtabs and soforth. None the less, it seems Tab-Archive is about to be targetted for closure.

Tab-Archive.com has not yet been approached to close, and dreads the day, howver believes it will be next. Why? Let’s explain.

Big sites have statistic programs that run in the background of their sites that collect information about their visitors, who there are and where they are from. It also tells you which sites have linked to your site. Tab-Archive creator found a legal site (http://lawcrawler.findlaw.com/) had been crawling across it. This means that this findlaw.com had been used to search for tab sites and http://www.tab-archive.com had been returned in their search.

To explain exactly what happened over at findlaw.com; someone had logged onto findlaw.com and search for sites similar to http://www.mxtabs.net, tab-archive.com was returned and so was http://www.azchords.com. I have contacted the guys at azchords to let them know.

It seems we have an insight into the future, and it does not look good for azchords and tab-archive.com.

Watch this space.
Sir P

http://lawcrawler.findlaw.com/

Shortly after all the fuss began regarding the threats by the MPA (Musicians Publishers Association); Taborama.com vanished.

Vanished is a very blunt word, and Taborama did exactly that.
There was no pre-warning, no email newsletter or no site posts announcing its demise, one day, it is was just gone.

Taborama did not follow suit and publish a closure statement on a one page website like many others such as powertabs, and mxtabs, it just shut its door and pointed its domain at ‘localhost’. For those of you that are not in the known, localhost means every time you click to Taborama.com, you are pointed straight back at your PC, usually displaying an error unless you are running a server. Anyway, stopping there before I dive into network/server theory.

I had been speaking to Taborama’s Canadian webmaster, Jeremy McCully for a number of years. Jeremy told me at the start of all the legal hype that it would blow other, nothing would come of it.

Later on, the threats seemed more real when powertabs and mxtabs closed down for a while.

Jeremy then investigated the royalty routes however this was very much a dead-end. Taborama then shut, deciding best to close before any legal action was even started against Taborama.com. This was not the last of Taborama; the site did make a brief comeback.

During Taborama’s first closed period, Jeremy was approached by a law post-graduate who advised he considers there to be a good case against the MPA and their allegations and that he would be happy to work against them on Taborama’s behalf. If I’m entirely honest with you, I did not hear what happened to that offer. I would take a wild guess and assume the offered did not materialise. Maybe I will ask Jer to kindly swing by and post a comment at the bottom of this bog letting us know what happened there.

As I previously mentioned, Taborama.com did re-open but very briefly. Jer decided to re-open as no further action or threats had been made since the initial letters in December 05. Furthermore, by this time Mxtabs was also open again. However that’s where the good news ends, a short while later, it was all over for Taborama.com.

Jeremy then decided enough was enough, he had a very good run with Taborama, meet some good people he still speaks to online today, made some cash savings along the way and built a excellent business/developers portfolio on what had been the glorious reign of Taborama.com And that was that, Taborama has not re-opened since, and not released a press release. Jeremy then went on to get a job developing databases, in the real world. It is a sad end to a good thing for Taborama fans, and TaboramaForum.com members however for Jer it is a good thing, no more stress of an undependable income, time for him to settle into a ‘real world’ job, put some pants on when he codes and rest his thumb after confirming all those tab submits.

Taborama fans still roaming the net for Taborama today. Tab-Archive.com received over 800 visitors last week alone that all searched for ‘Taborama’ in Google.

Taborama will never be forgotten and I wish Jer the best of luck in his future career.

None of this is to say Taborama will not be back as Jer claims;
‘No plans in the near future, but never say never.’

TABfly was an free ‘google style’ search engine for finding musical and tab related information from the web. It was not just restricted to searching for tablatures but only searched sites that had tabs on them. It would search the forums of sites, archives and feeds. Almost like google does. Only not quite as well as good, obviously.

TABfly had a rocky few months, going down and coming back up weekly. It returned with a new design that used AJAX. (AJAX is a new really swish internet technology that makes stuff super smooth and interactive). However shortly after it returned, days in fact; the database became crupt and it has not returned since. For a while all the traffic was pointed at the Riffwar tribute site, Riffwars.com however now the traffic has been sold and the web address tabfly.com points at several clients who share the traffic.

Will TABfly return?
In short; yes. Hopefully. Maybe one day, when TABfly is given some attention it will return however nothing is planned in the near future for the return of the google style tablature search engine.

TABfly, the once popular tablature search engine seems to have attracted some attention from a proactive fan.

Lyricsfly opened its doors sometime ago. The design seems to be a simpler version of TABfly, the concept is exactly the same also. The only difference is that it only searches for lyrics, no other results can be found using the lyricsfly system. Other than that, it gives the feel of TABfly.com

Lyricsfly administration were contacted by TABfly however never responded. TABfly being flattered, did not take legal action, instead choose to tihnk of it as a complaiment. In addition to that, Tab-Archive did a poll on the two sites and TABfly came up trumps