sTmykal

We all know that mp3 file sharing is "bad" because it "hurts the artist" (which really means it hurts the record company - don't mean to tell you what you already know, but this is what we call "the set-up"). Lawsuits and fines have been applied, people have been properly scared, so what's next? What now will the record companies want to impose their "creative control" over?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/technology/21ecom.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I'm too lazy to quote the article but here's the short of it. There exists many sites which provide hundreds and hundreds of files called "tabs". Tablature is how most musicians write music without learning to read music notation. It's very simple for guitarists. A six line bar represents the strings on a guitar and numbers placed on these lines represent the fret where a guitar string is meant to be pressed down. Line up enough of these and you have a melody or chord progression. If this melody produces a popular song, then you know have fodder for burgeoning garage bands every where.

Guitar magazines will often include tabs to popular songs as part of their regular features. Tablature itself is as old as the dickens. Finding massive collections of tabbed songs on the net back in '96 was a godsend for a guitar hack like me, whose ear is not so hot and perfect pitch is a dream.

But these days, it doesn't pay to share. It doesn't pay the record company at all. So now, after years and years of threatening legal action, The Man is getting serious and starting to shut down tab sites. The funny thing is, places like The Online Guitar Archive (which has been around for more than 10 years and remains pretty much unchanged) are community based. People submit *their own interpetation* of the artists work. They aren't posting mp3 files. They aren't scanning in sheet music. They're posting text files of chord progressions as they hear them and helping others to understand what they're hearing in their favorite songs.

So essentially, the record companies are claiming ownership of material created by people who are interpreting another persons work for informational purposes. This is like an art teacher being sued by an artist because they're teaching people to create art using the same tools.

So let's talk about hipocrisy and theft in the music industry...

Firstly, music and song are communicative traditions. Song and melody was something that was passed down - preserving a societies tradition, stories, beliefs and strengthening a community through the knowledge of its past. Most songs were never written down. More often they were memorized and then given to the next generation. Tunes we sing today - melodies that are familiar to everyone - most likely existed hundreds of years ago.

At the turn of the century, when recorded speech was really taking off and music was gaining popularity outside of the concert halls, there was a movement to document much of the tradition that came in the way of folk music. If I was more prepared, I'd have names for ya. But screw it. The short of it is that music publishers would go into the mountains, ask people to relate their long heritage of music to them and the publishers would copyright this music as their own!

Nevermind that these were generation spanning melodies. Forget that no one knows who exactly wrote what. The publishers took it for themselves, put a copryright date on it, and started making money from other peoples oral tradition. We all know June Carter - wife of Johnny Cash. Before she married Johnny, she sang with her family in The Carter Family - the "first family of coutnry music". Right. They were theives who co-opted the spirtual and cultural songs of "mountain folk" and made a buck on it. Their most popular music was probably carried over from Europe hundreds of years ago.

Who stole rock 'n' roll? Elvis? Fuck it. Rock was stolen long before Elvis stumbled into the recording studio looking for a cheap gift for his mother. No one really knows where the fuck blues came from. Shut up about "The Delta", religious "call and response" and field hollers. It's a good start, but consider this - when music publishers originally recorded Big Mama Thornton singing "Hound Dog" in the 1950s or even Mamie Smith singing "Crazy Blues" in the 1920s, the songs, the melodies, the tradition was most likely already 100 years old and evolving.

Which brings up that your basic eight bar blues is always going to be the same four chords no matter how you play it - no matter who sings it - no matter what record company puts its legal fingers around the throat of the artist. And to think - people were really freaked out by player pianos - claiming that they would be the death of the music industry.

God damnit - where's my point? Ownership of traditional art. That might be it. The record industry is really going too far at this point. They were hard on the tab sites ten years ago and it looks like they've ramped up their efforts. We all know that it won't do much good. As long as their are fans of music and musicians interested in learning another persons songs, the tradition of passing on music through instruction - authorized or not - will continue.