Malik
(5/19/08)
A quick reminder,
tomorrow will be the European additional tracks for the Rock Band
downloads. While I'm normally one to skip on most foreign music (I
like to understand the lyrics...except Rammstein always rocks in
German or English...more so in German, though), but I'll give each
song a listen (read: check the expert guitar charts on youtube) and
decide what to get based on how these songs look to be. Afterall,
Rock Band is a great chance to expand one's musical tastes.
It's just a little
funny that Harmonix is slightly screwing over Europe again. It
seemed like these tracks were specially included to make up for the
delay and price for Rock Band in Europe...and then North America
still gets these tracks before Europe.
Speaking of
expanding music tastes, I've been picking up my guitar (real guitar)
again. It's the first time I've given into being musically inclined
for a few years. It's also the first time since my favorite web site
for guitar stuff has been down. I'm talking about
OLGA.net. If the
link seems to give you almost nothing, there's a good reason.
I guess the RIAA
was not happy enough just f#@$ing up music for the average American.
Now (well, starting in 2006) they felt like messing up other things
beyond MP3s. This time it's homemade guitar tabs (for the
uninitiated to guitar, tabs are like sheet music...but easier to
read). Yes, they are tabs for actual RIAA controlled and overseen
songs, but not quite.
Tabs on OLGA are
not for actual songs. Yes, they are tabs that when played sound like
real songs. The difference is that these are primarily fan derived
tabs. People will listen to a song, pick out the guitar sounds and
then try to pick out what the chords and notes are based on sound.
Sometimes these match up with real tabs, and sometimes they don't.
You could find, for a popular song (Nirvana and Eagles especially),
a good 15 listings for tabs for a single song and few of them agree.
This is because most are not the actual tabs but sound like it when
played.
The RIAA issue
with this, at least according to their press releases and PR people,
is that these free online tabs drop the amount of purchases for real
guitar tab booklets. In reality, I don't know what to respond to
this part with, but rather have a different response; a lot of real
guitarists don't give a shit. Why? The money is not all that great
anyways. Instead of selling about 25,000 copies of a tab booklet,
the RIAA seems to imply that only about 5,000 are selling because of
sites like OLGA.net. It's a large loss (80%), but it's also not like
the 80% loss on something truly profitable.
Luckily, a new
site has been established that gives a good chunk of advertising
profits to the RIAA in exchange for posting fan created tabs. The
site in question could be
MXTabs
(which is an awesome site, indeed). The one problem with this
site is that it also requires the permission of bands or song
copyright holders to put the tabs online. Most bands are cool with
this, but then again...some bands don't own their songs and complete
nut cases own the real songs (hence, there's no Nirvana on this
site).
Anyway, long story
short, I just have to say that I'm happy with all of the smaller
recording groups that have come along in recent years. While the big
boys (Sony, Time Warner, etc.) are dicks about music, at least the
smaller groups tend to be more open to getting music out there so
new fans can find their ways to their bands.
Ok. I'm now just
mainly rambling. Luckily The Ramones are found on that new site, so
I'm good to get my easy, but ass kicking, punk action going.
Malik |