MXTabs

» see mxtabs.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2005 and 2006 I had a broadband line at home and what came down it was mp3s. Tabs were for people who played, which I did not. MXTabs is in here for what killed it rather than for what it was, because the same campaign reached the lyrics sites in the same season, and that part was visible from any country with a connection.

The site began in 1999 as a hobby drum tablature page. It added guitar and bass as it grew, and the shape was standard for the era: somebody worked a song out by ear, typed it into a submission box, and the archive got bigger without anyone being paid. By December 2005 it held more than 150,000 tabs.

That month the Music Publishers Association said it would start suing sites that carried unlicensed scores and lyrics in the new year. Its president, Lauren Keiser, told the BBC that closing sites and fining them was not enough on its own, and that if the authorities could throw in some jail time the campaign would be more effective. On 26 December 2005 MXTabs took the entire site offline rather than test the sentence.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the crackdown ~

A tab is a transcription. Someone listens to a recording, works out the notes, and writes them down in a plain text format that a beginner can follow. The publishers' position was that this produced an unlicensed derivative of the composition, so the person who did the work owned none of it and the archive holding a hundred thousand of them was infringing at scale. The argument was never tested against a tab site in court, because no tab site had the money to lose.

The same letters reached the On-line Guitar Archive, which had been running since 1992, first from a university FTP server and then under its own name as the reference collection for anyone learning a song. In June 2006 OLGA received a takedown letter from lawyers for the NMPA and the MPA and removed all 34,000 of its files. Two archives built across more than a decade were emptied within weeks of each other, by letter, with no ruling behind either one.

~ the open letter ~

MXTabs came back on 24 February 2006 with an argument rather than a lawyer. The letter on its front page said the site pushed up to $3,000 a month in sheet music sales, that plenty of the songs people came looking for had no official sheet music at all, and that nobody had yet established tabs as infringing. It closed by inviting the publishers to sit down and design a licensing system with the site instead of against it.

Nothing came back. On 25 June 2006 the administrators pulled the tablature down a second time and left it down, and the network's attention moved to the music review site its webmaster ran on the side, which is how Sputnikmusic outlived the thing it grew out of.

~ the second ending ~

The name got bought. On 27 March 2007 Musicnotes announced an agreement with the Harry Fox Agency covering guitar tabs, ad revenue flowing back to the publishers, and MXTabs was rebuilt on top of it. The new version crawled through a private alpha, opened to users outside the United States in May 2008, and launched properly that July. Songs appeared where a license existed and were missing where one did not, which was the whole difference between the two sites wearing the same name.

It ran three years like that. On 10 October 2011 MXTabs.net stopped and pointed its traffic at Songsterr, a company with no relationship to any of it, and the domain still does that today. What 150,000 submissions had built is not in there. The licensing system the open letter asked for did eventually get built, five years late and around a catalog that had already been deleted.

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