Should Tab Sites Be Legal?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sampler
  • Start date Start date

Should tab sites be legal?

  • Yes...I don't know what I'd do without them!!!!

    Votes: 175 85.0%
  • No...just go out and by the songbooks

    Votes: 15 7.3%
  • Not sure...

    Votes: 11 5.3%
  • What the heck are tabs???

    Votes: 5 2.4%

  • Total voters
    206
Trickle down economics and trickle down income is two totally seperate things.
trickle down income really works, trickle down economics is total bull shit.
'Splain for me the difference, will you?

trickle down economics is where the rich get richer and the poor still pays all the taxes that the rich has found loopholes to avoid paying taxes thus causing the poor to be poorer.

Actually, since the rich have written the tax laws and their attendant loopholes, it's not really a matter of finding them.
 
homerecording anyone? For good argeuments for and against trickle down economics check out Gailbraith, Sowell, Keynes, the list goes on. I hear they are all serious shredders.
 
homerecording anyone? For good argeuments for and against trickle down economics check out Gailbraith, Sowell, Keynes, the list goes on. I hear they are all serious shredders.

Shredders in the EVH sense or the Enron sense?

I heard the paper shredder and my heart stood still
Da Enron ron ron da Enron ron
The call from Arthur Anderson gave me a chill
Da Enron ron ron da Enron ron...

OK, OK, you're right. We return you now to all the home recording arguments, already in progress... ;^)
 
'Splain for me the difference, will you?
wikapedia can do a better job of defining trickle down economics than I can
but trickle down income goes kind of like this.... lets just say you develop such a delecious soup so good that Cambells offers to buy the recipe, you can write a contract to sell the recipee for the sum of a million dollars and every can of soup that is sold, you also recieve a nickle for every can sold from cambells on a quarterly basis or whateve agreement you come to with Cambells in your contract. the same principle goes for songwriters who sell their songs to record companies or recording artists or inventors who sell their inventions to be sold on the open market.

see what I'm satin?





Actually, since the rich have written the tax laws and their attendant loopholes, it's not really a matter of finding them.

this is so true:D
 
I've gotta say .. YOU don't know how the "biz" works, do you?

I know from first-hand experience, because I work for a music publishing company. Our "biz" is, literally, publishing and selling sheet music and instructional books.

And I'll tell you from direct, first-hand knowledge, there is plenty of money to be made for the artist. Whether it's profit for them or still recouping advances from the record company, it doesn't matter. It's still profit for them.

Here's a quick example. Let's say we put out a book of Tom Petty transcriptions. Artist (or, more specifically, the songwriter(s)) typically make about 12% of artist folio books that we sell. If the book sells for, say, $20, that's $2.40 in Petty's pocket (for the most part --- he has co-writers occasionally) for every book sold.

How many books like that do we sell a year? Well let me look it up really quickly .....

Ok .. looks as though we're selling about 3,000 copies a year of Tom Petty's Greatest Hits tab book. So that's about $7,200 a year from that tab book. That's nothing, right?

However, that's one Tom Petty book. You know how many Petty books we have in our catalog that sell about that many numbers? A quick search I just did revealed about 15. So that's more like $108,000 ..... a year, for doing nothing at all except having written some of the most enduring hits in rock history.

And this is just tab books! We also have PVGs (piano/vocal/guitar arrangements), Guitar Chord Songbooks, and others in the Petty catalog that do well for him.

And if you're thinking ... yeah, well, he's an established artist, he's been around forever, I have 2 words for you: Hannah (frickin') Montana. Now granted, she's not making money off guitar tabs, but she's rolling it in by the boatloads in music books in general. It seems that we release one or two new HM books a week, each one selling off the shelves.

Or what abound a band like Maroon 5? They're a big new band on the scene, like many other big new bands. Their matching tab folio to the Songs About Jane album sold over 18,000 copies in two years. That's about $43,000 to the songwriter(s) already. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't sneeze at that.

As I said before, whether or not this money is going into their pockets or back to the record companies to recoup doesn't matter. It's still their money, and it's nothing to sneeze at.

Besides, just because your friend obviously didn't sign a good deal with the company and/or wasn't smart with their advances doesn't mean everyone's like that. You owe the record company what you owe by contractual obligation. If it states in your contract that you owe them for all the promotion, air travel, limo rides, expensive dinners, and other luxaries, then all of that expense comes out of your earnings. But there are bands that are smarter than that and aren't so wasteful with their money.

The record companies lose a lot on artists too that don't go anywhere. If you're $200,000 in the hole after 3 albums and the record company drops you, they eat that cost. The band doesn't pay it back.

Anyway, that's not my point. The point is that to say bands don't make money on music books is ignorant and uninformed.


OK< so Petty gets good money, but his annual income from performing and CD sales is probably 20-40 times the book income. The "average " band that is making 1/10 of that is only seeing 1/100 of the tab book sales, too. Yes, it's at least something, but not sure that smaller artists get as much as 12% of the book sales as you say Petty gets.
 
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