Well, bite me even harder...

[dianec42]

Song sites face legal crackdown

"The music industry is to extend its copyright war by taking legal action against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics.
The Music Publishers' Association (MPA), which represents US sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against such sites in 2006."

As much as I despise the quality of most of the lyrics and guitar tabs available on the web, they're still better than NOTHING, which is what the bloody MPA offers for most of the songs I generally want to do. I'm happy to pay for sheet music when it exists. (And when it doesn't suck, which all too often it does.)

I hate everyone. Discuss.

Comments

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

That's very annoying. Particularly as even when they do publish a song on paper it's generally in a book full of other stuff you've no interest in.

I'm with you on this one sister - free music now! Although I must admit that most of the stuff I look up went out of copyright a couple of hundred years ago... the joy of the Digital Tradition Mirror. :)

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

I suppose this might mean the guys will finally stop downloading those dodgy chord charts. Every cloud has a silver lining...

This does mean that if I want to post the World's Only Correct Bass Tab for that one Police tune, I should probably get cracking.

[merde.livejournal.com]

as much of a copyright nut as i am, i'm inclined to agree with you. however, i happen to know someone who's got one semester left in law school and plans to specialize in intellectual property law, so why don't i send him over and see what he might have to say on the subject?

(and by the way: if you turn out to know Lockhart (eejitalmuppet), i will cede victory to you.)

[merde.livejournal.com]

(i should note that eejitalmuppet is not the law student in question. that would be holfax.)

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

What's to say? It's the music industry's usual method-- their response to an existing service, one for which there is a demonstrated need, is not a business response ("Hey, we should provide a better service, and thus make money satisfying our customer's needs") but a legalistic one ("Let's sue everybody!") It's pathetic, and I hope the MPA either gets a clue or else joins the RIAA in dying a horrible flaming death.

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

Is there further news of the RIAA dying in horrible flaming ways? Now THAT would cheer me up.

I have many rantings I could rant about the crappy sheet music I've spent good money on. But not before caffeine. By the time I get coherent enough to rant, I shall be overtaken by the futility of it all and not have the energy.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

They're legally right and practically wrong: folks poisting lyrics and tabs (not so sure about chord charts) are infringing copyrights, but this is going to neither win the industry friends nor earn them more money. Forget "a better service" -- as has been pointed out, in many cases the sheet music isn't legitimately available at all: they should respond by at least providing some service! (Okay, they do provide some miniscule service: a small percentage of tunes are published in sheet music form. I haven't shopped in a while, but as I recall the tunes that are available legitimately are usually simplified piano arrangements, often difficult to work from if you're trying to work out a quartet arrangement. So they do ned to provide a better service, but they also need to provide a wider service. Obviously the demand is there...)

It's shortsighted. And it seems petulant: not so much, "pirates are stealing our customers," as "hey, somebody else is making money in the market we overlooked -- how dare they!" They've got the resources to dominate if they wanted to (there'll always be infringing transcriptions, but the industry could gobble the biggest piece of the pie). Maybe it's not cost effective in that they wouldn't get a big enough return from expending those resources*; in that case, what's the financial harm to them from letting others fill the need more cheaply? Maybe even licensing it cheaply?

But legally they have no obligation to satisfy the market's demand for a product** -- if a copyright holder decides not to publish, legally nobody else gets to override that decision***. It's stupid and it comes across as (and may be) mean spirited, but they have a legal right to be stupid (and mean). I just wish they wouldn't.

Question: what do folks think would be a reasonable price to pay for a correct complete score/tab? For a lyrics/lead/chords sheet (or "fakebook" arrangement)?

---

*Actually, I'm quite certain that it would not be cost effective for them to produce printed editions of much more of their catalogs than they already do, in the ways that they already do them. But electronic distribution or printing-on-demand would radically change the economics -- the folks they're talking about suing aren't making warehouses full of printed editions either, after all -- and depending on how they handle it the pre-press costs could be driven down as well. They'd still be paying someone to do what hobbyists are currently doing for free, but if they get the artists themselves to transcribe parts (or to sit down with a transcriber), I bet they could get their costs down into a profitable range.

**Then again ... do they have a fiscal obligation to their shareholders to not pass up opportunities to earn additional profit from properties they already own, even if they have no obligation to their audiences?

***Handwaving aside for the moment the special cases for which compulsory licenses exist, since as far as I can recall there's no compulsory license for sheet music or printed lyrics.

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

I did find myself thinking that I would be happy to PAY to download tabs from these sites, but then I remembered the abysmal quality of most of the actual tabs that I've seen. I wouldn't pay a dollar for most of what's out there. (-:

I've seen sheet music arrangements of individual songs for about $3, and I'd be happy to pay that if any of those were the songs I actually want. I'm less happy paying 12 bucks for a book of 6 songs if I only want one or two of them. And if I had to download them and print them myself, I'd still be okay with paying $2 a song or so. Can someone please point out to these idiots that I'm not the only one who wants to give them my money, and that we're only doing the unauthorized tabs because nothing else exists??

A couple more thoughts about routes to legitimacy

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Yah, I was wondering about a fair price for tabs/scores that are any good.

Of couse, at least until the new model caught on, there'd be a lot of "this used to be free!" momentum to work against ... and piracy of the initially legitimately-posted works, but at least if they sued someone for republishing an authorized score, they'd have a much clearer moral/ethical ground to stand on: legally they're clear now but the fact that we're having this discussion means they haven't won hearts & minds -- if 'twere a clear case of "you're giving away something we made and are selling next door, that you copied from us," instead of, "you're giving away something we won't sell," fewer people would think they were being assholes. Well, if the legitimate copies were reasonably priced to begin with, anyhow.

Here's an interesting twist: if they choose the right encoding, it'll cost them no more to offer each customer a choice of standard notation, tab, or both together (or parts for transposing instruments transposed or written at concert pitch, or whole songs in standard notation transposed to whatever key the customer wants) than it would to pick a single format to sell. Depending on whether the transcriber starts with the tab or not, it might not even be more up-front work to prepare the scores. (Some tunes could have tab automatically generated from the standard notation, but you'd still need at least a proofreading pass for those.) Hell, I could even see, if there's enough demand for it, "simplified" and "like the CD" versions of each part being available for some songs, where the customer can select between those on a per-instrument basis to customize the download.

Now how much would you pay? But wait! There's more! Call before midnight and we'll throw in ... *cough*

I mean, dayum, "large print" and "cram it all on a page" are valid last-minute on-demand options to offer for electronic delivery. Even "practice MIDIs" for each individual instrument at two speeds, if the customer is downloading the product.

The design of the database and the system for assembling/typesetting scores pulled out of it is coalescing in my head and making the inside of my skull all tingly.



So the things the folks with way more business sense than I've got (and I'm not talking about the *cough* professional businessmen already in the music publishing industry) need to figure out are:

How much will folks pay for a legitimate copy of a quality transcription of a new song without DRM, downloaded, at a music store, and mail-order? (We know that in your case the answers are $2/$3...)

How much will people pay for the same transcriptions with well-thought-out and well-implemented DRM?

How much will people pay for the same transcriptions if they aren't allowed to thumb through them before they've paid for them? That is, if they have to rely on a publisher's reputation to guess the quality ... (Have you checked out any of the existing commercial sheet music download sites yet?)

How much will people pay for the same transcriptions with crappy, PITA DRM?

How much will people pay for a legitimate copy when Joe Pirate has ripped it off and is offering free unauthorized copies of what he bought?

How much will people pay for good legitimate copies of tunes where crappy free ones are already online? How much will people pay for nicely typeset legitimate copies in standard notation when correct tabs are already available online?

How much of a cut will music stores want for putting a POD station on the sales floor and refilling the ink and paper in it?

What kind of manpower will it take to get good transcriptions online before hundreds of listeners post their own free transcriptions off the radio?

And finally, a bit of non-RIAA thinking ...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

For folks wanting to publish transcriptions legitimately: Who owns the tunes? If the artist or songwriter owns the tune and has given the record company a non-exclusive license, all we have to do is get permission from / cut a deal with the copyright owner to make transcriptions available that the RIAA can't sue us over. If the copyright was sold to the record company, or if an exclusice license has been granted, we can't do that.

If the copyright for the song is held by one entity but the arrangement folks want to copy was put together by another (e.g. band buys melody/lyrics/chords from a songwriter and invents their own bass and drum parts, guitar riffs, etc.), someone who understands the whole "derivative works" aspect of copyright law needs to figure out who can give permission for what. But if the band that performed/recorded it also wrote it, the question is simply how much did they give away to the record company?

Speaking tangentially of sheet music ...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Are you as comfortable in standard notation as tab on the bass? And how many frets have you got? (Do you have a high E on the G string? I've only up to Eb.) Erm ... and how do you feel about harmonics?

Uh, just wondering ... <innocent look> %flutters eyelashes%

Re: Speaking tangentially of sheet music ...

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

I'm way more comfortable in standard notation. But sometimes tab is all there is.

Without looking, I can say I've got more than 12 frets (I have a high G on the G string). I think I've got about 15, but the last few aren't very useful, as my hands just aren't bendy enough.

I mostly find harmonics useful when the tuner refuses to listen to the low B string. Perhaps I'm in some sort of denial...

Re: Speaking tangentially of sheet music ...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

The last few frets are hard to reach even with that nice, deep cutaway on the high side? Okay, I'll take that into acco ... uh, I mean I'll file that hypothetically useful knowledge away for future u ... er ... <innocent look>

So you can hit harmonics but probably wouldn't want to have to do so at speed in the middle of a tune then, right?

Re: Speaking tangentially of sheet music ...

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

I don't actually use harmonics while playing songs. I'm not actually very good at this yet. (-: Maybe someday...

Also, we tend to cover classic-rock type stuff, so bass harmonics aren't usually called for. Or at least we can get away without using them.

I have enough other bad habits to unlearn, I think I need to concentrate on doing CORRECTLY the things I'm already doing, and then maybe get fancy.