Firm Strikes Song Deals; Musicnotes to Offer Free Guitar Notation on Web

By RICK ROMELL

Musicnotes Inc. of Madison said Thursday that it has signed licensing agreements with several thousand music publishers and administrators as part of a bid to build a Web site offering free, legal guitar notation for copyrighted songs.

Among those signing on with Musicnotes for its MXTabs venture are major music publisher BMG, Bug Music, Famous Music and peermusic. With the agreements, MXTabs will be able to offer guitar and drum tablature – a simple form of musical notation – for songs by such artists as Coldplay, Linkin Park, Maroon 5, Wilco, Elvis Costello, Spoon, Modest Mouse, The Guess Who, Ryan Adams and Willie Dixon.

Although the signings represent a good start, MXTabs still needs a significantly larger music library to compete with renegade Web sites that offer tablature without paying royalties to the music’s copyright owners, said Tim Reiland, Musicnotes chairman and chief financial officer. The company will announce further agreements soon, he said.

For about the last year, the country’s music publishers have been battling the unauthorized sites. Many have been forced to shut down, but others continue to flourish, sometimes by operating from abroad.

Musicnotes, an online retailer of sheet music, hopes to compete with those sites by offering enough licensed material to attract users and the advertising money that follows them. Toward that goal, it acquired MXTabs in the fall. MXTabs had been among the free sites that closed last year over copyright issues – voluntarily, in its case. Now, Musicnotes is repositioning it as a legitimate provider of tablature.

Musicnotes plans to launch the site, MXTabs.net, this summer.

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