In Tune With Musicians, Law: Site Plans to Offer Free, Legal Notation for Copyrighted Songs
By Rick Romell, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Mar. 28–Madison’s Musicnotes Inc., an online retailer of sheet music, plans to launch a Web site where guitarists can legally download notation for copyright-protected songs for free.
But questions remain about whether enough publishers will sign on to give the new site the critical mass of songs it will need to attract users and, in turn, advertising.
“We’ve got some good industry backing, but we need more,” Tim Reiland, chairman and chief financial officer of Musicnotes, said Tuesday.
The country’s music publishers have declared war on a host of Web sites that offer simplified forms of sheet music without paying any royalties. On such sites, users who have figured out the chords for songs, or a simple type of notation called tablature, post the results for other guitarists to see.
Pressure last year from the publishers, who allege copyright infringement, shut down several of the most popular sites.
Among them was MXTabs .net, which Musicnotes has acquired. Musicnotes plans to re-open the site this summer. The plan is to fill it with user-created tablature and sell advertising to generate revenue that will be shared with copyright holders of the featured music.
Only songs for which the copyright owners have given permission will be available, and it will be crucial for Musicnotes to amass a large database.
“We need to get into the tens of thousands (of songs) quickly,” Reiland said. “Certainly before we’re ready for this summer, we need to have tens of thousands if not close to 100,000.”
Toward that goal, Musicnotes has recruited a strong partner — the 80-year-old Harry Fox Agency Inc., which already collects royalties on recorded music and distributes them to 31,000 publishers.
The agency will help administer the tablature program and see that the appropriate copyright holders get paid, Reiland said.
Partnering with the agency is important because it already has relationships with so many publishers, Reiland said.
Beyond the challenge of striking deals with enough publishers, Musicnotes will face plenty of competition.
The music publishers have shut down many tablature sites, but in the often-unruly world of the Internet, what gets squashed in one spot might pop up in another. A quick search, for example, easily found 12 sites featuring tablature for “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel.
All will be competition for Musicnotes’ effort to build a successful, industry-approved tablature site. The company is counting in part on amateur guitarists opting for a site where the creators of the music get compensated for their work.
“We’d like to think that consumers would bias toward free and legal as opposed to free and illegal,” Reiland said.
An executive with Milwaukee’s Hal Leonard Publishing Corp., the world’s largest publisher of printed music, declined Tuesday to comment on the Musicnotes venture.
Jeff Schroedl, vice president of pop and standard publications at Hal Leonard, said he first read about Musicnotes’ planned site Tuesday morning.
Hal Leonard sells guitar tablature over the Web, charging $3.95 per song for the professionally prepared notation.
Musicnotes sells professionally prepared tablature too, charging about $5 for the sheet music to a song and an accompanying digital file for use in learning the piece.
Reiland said the free and paid products were different enough to co-exist.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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