Cool Cherry Cream

Every once in awhile, I'll hear a song and be inspired to learn to play it on guitar, or drums, or harmonica, or piano (I'm multi-talentless, you see). "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan just happened to pop up on iTunes today and I thought, hey, it's acoustic, sounds fairly simple, and maybe even recognizable, so I should learn to play it!

I go on over to 911 Tabs, search, and pick a guitar tab. It just so happens I've been taken to Tab World Online, who no longer has the tab, but instead a notice that they've been contacted and asked to remove the tabs.

One thing caught my eye:

Unfortunately, Tab World Online, like 99% of the tabsites on the internet does not have the financial resources to pay the administrative fee of $10,000 which the record companies are asking for.

$10,000 is a lot of money, I agree. I certainly would not be able to get $10,000 if someone told me I had to pay it or shut this website down.

But if all the tab sites and their users banded together and raised money towards this common goal, we would have $10,000 in no time, and a legal solution to the tab site dilemma!

Has this happened yet? And if not, why? This should be fairly easy.

I, like most other people, probably don't donate money when we see the little PayPal button. We all like things free, I understand. But places like Wikipedia, etc, do exists, and they get money from some charitable people, somewhere.

And even if we starving guitarists can't raise enough money, surely there are some pro-musicians who might be "for" this sort of thing that could help us in our cause! Of course, some musicians will argue that it's a bad thing because they are losing money, yada yada, but the ones who do help out could receive some extra promotion on the site, or something else in return. There has to be some rock star out there who believes in helping the next generation of musicians… and if any of them happen to be reading this, you can go ahead and contact me. ;)

I know we young people tend to complain a lot, but never offer solutions or actually implement them. I've done two out of three (which we all know ain't bad), but I'm certainly not the person to implement this change. Guitar tab site admins need to get in contact with each other, people who already know what they're doing, and you guys need to get this started. But before I pass the responsibility on, I must say this tab site really needs to be a wiki. You and I both know how awful most of the tabs out there are, and if it was easier to correct them, a lot more people would.