keeping tabs on Morgan Wallen
it has recently came to my attention — courtesy of Reddit — that there is a country pop star by the name of Morgan Wallen, and that whoever owns the publishing rights to his songs removed crowdsourced takes of them from the Ultimate Guitar website.
having listened to the singles from Wallen’s current album, I can vouch for part a of the redditor’s concerns (if you want the tabs to Last Night, bell me and i’ll mail them over).
as for removing guitar tabs: my initial reaction to hearing about this was ‘wtf’? i hardly visit guitar tab websites any more, but there has never been an occasion when a publisher or artist blocked the upload of tabs for a song i wanted to play, so i never fully clocked this, and wondered why this should happen anyway? sites like Ultimate Guitar mainly consist of the user generated entries of random people trying to figure out songs for others’ benefit. call me old-fashioned, but is this not one of the best use cases for the world wide web’s existence: the ability to connect people across the world through the free and fair exchange of knowledge?
but as i peer beyond the end of my own nose, i soon realise that this view is hopelessly romantic. i doubt that you could make a website like Ultimate Guitar from scratch these days, because you can never underestimate the megalomaniacal tendencies of corporations, which includes publishing and recording companies. and, as one contributor to the chat suggested, taking down sheet music is nothing new (Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Paul McCartney were among other artists mentioned).
but i still find it galling that anyone would see the approximate interpretation and sharing of songs for people to play for themselves as a form of theft. if the apocryphal tale of Mozart’s note-for-note transcription of Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere happened today, the publishing industry would be less forgiving than the catholic church.
and to be harsh, where is Morgan Wallen in all of this? if he loves his fans as much as the royalties he gets from his songs, then surely he can have a word with whoever did this? then again, a glance at his Wikipedia entry suggests he only does grand gestures to make up for controversies he’s caused, possibly in keeping with a bro-country persona…
Sidebar: why are so many white pop stars prone to racist outbursts? searches for any major label recording artist under 50 years of age + the word 'racist' too often bring up a link to an article about a contentious moment in their careers.
some have been so bold as to sing the quiet part out loud, then double down on it (see Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town).
for Wallen's part, he is reported to have been contrite about his actions, perhaps when he found a spare moment to think about racism, enabling a seamless shift from age 2 to 3 of the 4 ages of white innocence. but if anything, both Aldean and Wallen have only become more popular than ever, proving racism to be a profitable career path for white pop stars in apartheid america. rather than rock versus racism, nowadays it seems as though racism is the new rock'n'roll.… so the counter argument rests upon ‘the principle of a company that doesn’t own his songs making money off them by selling subscriptions to view them or earning ad revenue from page views of his songs’, as another contributor put it. to which i’d argue that while the publishing companies certainly have a case against Ultimate Guitar over that, do you really believe that if a similar website was held on a bunch of servers hosted by some random hobbyists in their own homes at a personal loss to themselves — say in academia — the publishing companies would leave them be? in which case, i’m sure Alexandra Elbakyan would like to have a word with you… oh, is that the ghost of Aaron Swartz on the line?
i think my initial instincts are correct: if i want to learn a song, i’ve likely paid to stream a digital or own a physical copy of the recording, and if i happen to have a good enough ear to interpret it as notation or tablature to freely share with others, then tough luck to publishers who have a problem with that. i’d say the same thing the other way around. besides, how it is my problem that publishers don’t make sheet music more readily accessible for purchase? sort it out!
alternatively, if you want to make it impossible to play your songs, i’d politely suggest that you make your songs impossible to play. like i said at the start, it’s been a long a time since i regularly visited these kinds of sites, but i’m yet to see a perfect rendition of Fracture by King Crimson on any of them. we’re getting close though. maybe ai will crack it.