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Musicnotes Announces First Free, Licensed Legal Guitar Tab Web Site

Posted on: Friday, 30 March 2007, 09:00 CDT

MADISON, Wis., March 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Musicnotes, Inc., announced today it has acquired and plans to reopen the popular guitar tablature website, MXTabs.net as the first site to work directly with music publishers in offering free, licensed legal guitar tab downloads.

Through agreements with music publishers, participating copyright holders will receive a portion of all advertising revenue generated through views of their tablature on the web site MXTabs.net, while still retaining control over their song catalog in a robust online community.

Many well-trafficked guitar tab web sites have recently shut down due to industry pressure for offering transcriptions of copyright-protected songs without proper licensing. MXTabs.net was previously one of the most popular of these guitar tab web sites, before it voluntarily removed all guitar tablature in the summer of 2006. The site and its assets have since been acquired by Guitar Tabs LLC., a wholly owned subsidiary of Musicnotes, Inc.

Guitar tabs (tablature) are transcriptions of music presented in a text-based format that has become increasingly popular with guitarists online. The text format allows guitarists to transcribe music for guitar and easily post these transcriptions to MXTabs.net, without requiring advanced knowledge of computers or other notation software.

Similar to YouTube, Wikipedia and other user-generated content sites, the guitar tab arrangements offered on MXTabs were created, reviewed and edited by the site's enthusiastic guitarist community. With the new legal version of MXTabs, users will again be encouraged to participate in the MXTabs community to help build, grow and continually improve the MXTabs song catalog. This includes creating guitar tabs for songs that are not popular enough to warrant the publication of a traditional song book.

However, unlike many other user-generated content sites, only songs that have received permission from participating copyright owners will be made available online.

MXTabs.net is expected to launch its new web site in summer of 2007. For more information on how to participate, publishers and administrators are encouraged to visit http://www.mxtabs.net/.

About Musicnotes: Musicnotes, Inc., the online leader in digital sheet music, offers an impressive online catalog of nearly 60,000 digital sheet music titles, built on the strength of content agreements with Alfred Publishing, BMG, Sony/ATV Publishing, Famous Music, Peermusic, Word Music, EMI Christian, Bug Music and others. Musicnotes was also recently selected as one of the Top 500 Online Retailers by Internet Retailer Magazine.

Musicnotes, Inc.

CONTACT: Bill Aicher, Director of Marketing of Musicnotes, Inc. andMXTabs.net, +1-608-662-3678, aicher@musicnotes.com

Web site: http://www.musicnotes.com/http://www.mxtabs.net/

Source: PRNewswire

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