Crikey.
I feel a bit like a broken record complaining about the music industry and the way they seem to gleefully prosecute fans for downloading MP3s, but this takes the biscuit. Lots and lots of musicians learn to play their instruments thanks to free tabs on the internet. It's an educational tool, not a piracy threat. Also, quite a few tabs you'll find online are wrong anyway, they're a personal interpretation of a piece of music, and are rarely perfect. I'm sure if you wanted the 'real' version of the song, you could buy a sheet music book for it, but most people just want to know how this riff goes. Actually, this is an interesting point - are the tabs and lyrics still illegal if they're wrong? There comes a point where you can say "this isn't Hotel California any more". What then?
Another reason why this just makes my head hurt is that if you download a tab, you're downloading something to help you play the song, not the song itself. If your band learned to play Razorlight's new song from a tab, are you depriving the band of royalties?
The linked article makes it sound as if the act of covering a song is harming the artist ("Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing,") - especially odd considering rarely is any profit made from amateur tablature. It begs the question, where does a song start and end? Downloading lyrics is not the same as listening to a performance, should they be treated as if it is? Is a song a product of its lyrics and musical notes, or is it more to do with performance? |
