Power Tabs Network News

The old Power Tab Wiki contained lots of valuable information about the Power Tab Editor and the Archive, and provided a fine set on theory-related articles based on Power Tab examples. However, although there should have been a larger traffic, the Wiki was not well visited - possibly because of most people being unfamiliar with Wiki software apart from using Wikipedia. Furthermore, the Wiki has been explicitly mentioned in the take-down letter of the lawyers. This is the main reason for its current unavailability. However, with the new restart of powertabs.net, the Wiki has been replaced by articles. Some old wiki pages have already been converted! More are on the way.

If you have been one of the authors of the old Wiki articles, please send me a short note, to which articles you have contributed to, such that you can receive full credit for it (articles will be linked to the respective member pages).

If you are interested in contributing articles, please contact me. I will set up some general guidelines in the near future, but you can start contributing right away. I am planning to add commenting features to the articles in the near future too.

Browsing the entire powertabs.net tablature archive has been re-enabled yesterday - including tablature and profile information, ratings, comments and thank yous. Please note, that the actual tabs are not yet downloadable, but we are intensively working on rolling out the new legal download solution as soon as possible! One of the main missions of powertabs.net has been to act as a certificate of authenticity of tablature authorship. Out of the 25000+ Power Tabs only a very few “stolen” ones are left, i.e. tablature that has been blatantly taken from other sites and submitted to powertabs.net. It is my sincere hope, that you find re-enabling a browsing of this information useful, even if downloads are still unavailable.

Once again, the legal-compliant solution is in the works. Expect more details on this topic already at the beginning of the next week!

As there are different development projects going on at the moment, we need some place to discuss various topics. Please visit the new sub-forum at our forum, if you are interested in collaborating, or just want to see what’s going on in this area. This is also the place, where people new to programming might ask questions about programming in general - the idea is, that programming and coding issues might be easier to explain from musician to musician than using a hardcore-coders forum for this purpose.

On July 16th, the community donations to cover the legal damage costs issued by the lawyers, who sued powertabs.net reached the level of USD 5000! While I was very hesitant to put up the whole donation thing at the beginning, I sincerely want to thank every donor for the support! The future looks very good, much is happening behind the scenes, and I will try to keep you up2date here at the blog. Sincere thanks once again!

A long while ago (back in 2003), when I first thought about a complete rewrite of the underlying site code of powertabs.net, I had the idea to start an open-source project for this. I opened a project at SourceForge, but unfortunately, at that point in time, there have been too few contributors, such that the project slowly died before starting to prosper.

However, the time is right to give it another try, so there is a new phpta project at Google Code, and a discussion group, which you might want to join, if you are interested in collaborating in a way or another.

I will post first ideas (customizable layouts, plugin system, …) at the news group in due time. This blog will serve as the official announcement blog for phpta-development related issues, which might be interested for a broader public.

There seem to be some misunderstandings in the case of sheet music rights, which I will try to clarify a bit below. The reason, why powertabs.net has been shut down by the authorities on behalf of the MPA was based on the fact that artists gain royalties not only when their songs are being broadcast, but also when notes and lyrics are displayed publicly. The legal status of transcriptions, e.g. in the form of tablature, was not always obvious and often considered as a gray area. Interestingly, it is in no way relevant whether the transcription has been taken from a book/magazine, or has been completely transcribed by ear (even considering a slight different interpretation of the respective tune). That’s why right holders do not necessarily try to produce highest quality tablature books, because the transcriber is not relevant in the standard process of creating those songbooks, and does not receive any special form of compensation. This fact and its implications will be covered in a soon-to-be-published blog post, as this seems to be important for the powertabs.net community, because this involves discussions about royalties for transcribers, and - possibly more important - the general idea of producing highest quality transcriptions.

Furthermore, as always, it’s not the artists themselves that claim royalties directly, but there are companies, which bought rights and are reselling them. There are only a very few companies world-wide which own the rights to most songs you can think of. They are organizing the transfer of royalties to the respective authors. As the rights have been sold by the artists, there is no way around to actually paying the price.

Of course, you as an artist can choose otherwise, i.e. deciding not to charge anything. However, this general process of displaying rights does also exhibit some positive implications: it does mean that you are generally entitled to receive royalties on your own songs and more importantly also on your own arrangements of songs - so winning an UCC, or re-arranging a video game tune for guitar and bass might also turn into $$$ in the near future. In this regard - considering the latest changes from last.fm, it is definitely a good time to be an independent artist, isn’t it? In subsequent stages of transferring powertabs.net into a legal, royalty-paying tab site, it will also be necessary to add a license to all user compositions and arrangements. This means that you are free to choose, whether you put your own work under some e.g. Creative Commons license or aim at receiving royalties through our premium advertising or subscription-based services.

I created a thread at the forum to discuss the issues mentioned in this post. I am pretty sure, that there are some items worth discussing.

During the Power Tabs Network Survey, which was put online today and we kindly ask you to take part in it, three methods to pay royalties for authors of transcribed songs have been mentioned. Some people immediately suspected that a transaction-based model could be implemented in some way or another. Rest assured, this will never be the case for powertabs.net. In summary, the options to cover royalty payments can be summarized as follows:

1. Premium Advertsing. Royalties are entirely covered by advertising revenues. Unrestricted access to the whole archive is granted for all registered participants. Downloads are tracked and exact payments are handled continuously to the respective rights holders.
2. Subscription-based. Additionally, a payment of a monthly/quarterly/yearly fee for gaining unrestricted access to the whole archive is charged, either on a volutary basis, or if the advertising revenue does not suffice at all. Such a premium membership could also include other community features additionally.
3. Transaction-based (pay-per-view). The right to download a tab costs a certain amount of money.

It is clear, that a transaction-based version of powertabs.net would be exactly the opposite of what the community is all about, e.g. Golbez nailed it exactly at the forum:

Yeah, the pay-per-view idea would be awful, because then you could never leisurely browse other tabs if they seemed interesting. You might not even learn it, but you just want to hear how it turned out (IE videogame tunes). And I wouldn’t like a further deterrent from having people check out my work.

I already communicated this to the authorities in June, and they completely understood this point. We agreed, that if it is not possible to fund all royalty payments via premium advertising, and members are not willing to pay some (possibly small) subscription fee, than a tablature community like powertabs.net is not able to exist in it’s current form on a legal basis - but of course, this should (and will) not happen.

In summary: In the near future, a solution based on download tracking and premium advertising will be implemented. Premium subscription-based membership will be available on a voluntary basis to support the advertising revenue in covering royalty payments.

It’s been a long time since any new developments regarding the Power Tab Editor and related products have been announced publicly. However, many projects are underway. One of the most recent ones is the Ruby Power Tab open-source project, which aims at porting Brads Power Tab Parser into the beautiful Ruby programming language. The goal of this project is to develop a platform-independent open-source Power Tab Viewer and Player along with a set of useful tools for Power Tabs (e.g. Score-Merging, …). It is agreed, that a scripting language is not the most appropriate tool to base any PTE 2.0 related things on it, as it is clear, that such efforts should be accomplished programming-language independently, however the Ruby Power Tab goals mentioned above should motivate for some collaborative efforts of designing an open-source viewer. In addition, there is already a set of PHP scripts available open-source. If you are interested in collaborating, please join the Ruby Power Tab discussion group.

In order to complete the soon-to-happen official relaunch of powertabs.net - this time MPA-approved - the blog is back too. Lots of things are going on at the moment, such that a complete report of what is going on is hard to post at once. The blog will definitely support the need to inform you as a part of the community timely and thoroghly, and serve as the main platform to keep you updated about the community and related developments.