Publishers Join Effort to Kill Music By George Ziemann -- Revised Dec. 12, 2005 With the record labels having tainted radio with payola and poisoned the CD marketplace with spyware in their quest to make people stop listening to music for free, the Music Publishers' Association (MPA), which represents US sheet music companies, will begin its campaign to discourage performance of music they own in 2006, by taking legal action against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics. According to a BBC report, "MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed. He said unlicensed guitar tabs and song scores were widely available on the internet but were 'completely illegal.' He did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can 'throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective'." Why does the entire music industry hate musicians so much? Do you want anyone to hear your songs played or not? Yes, I know, the songwriters aren't getting paid every time someone learns their song. But they do get performance royalties. If we're playing your songs, you should be getting paid, whether we downloaded the lyrics or just memorized them. But you're not, because neither ASCAP or BMI really cares what music is actually being played live. No one gives them play lists from shows. Every bar and concert venue in the country pays ASCAP and BMI so that the musicians can play whatever they want, but there is no effort whatsoever to ascertain the proper distribution to the correct authors. In 33 years, no one has ever asked to see a list of the songs being performed. They pay the songwriters whose music the record labels have paid to have played on the radio, MTV, etc. If it's not being played on Clear Channel, whoever wrote it probably doesn't get paid much. I'm sure ASCAP charges all the roller rinks royalties but never bothers to ask if people are skating to "In Da Hood" or the Hokey-Pokey is still what it's all about.. Sheet music is a pain in the ass, even when it is actually correct (they're not as picky about Lennon/McCartney songs as they are Beethoven, for some reason). If I need lyrics and/or a chord chart for a song, I need it to be on one page, with a sans serif font size big enough that I could read it in dim red or blue light. Even if I do buy the sheet music for a song, I'm going to have to go through the hassle of making an illegal copy just so I can see the damn words. There will be no turning pages. You can't buy it in the form that I need it. The publishers are the only ones allowed to provide it, but they don't. This means that every page of my personal binders of lyrics and chords of all the songs I've learned (or at least performed) in the last 20 or so years, is a copyright violation, even if I actually shelled out for real charts. This is just another example of the music biz failing to meet the needs of musicians, then getting pissed off because someone solved it for us. So now they want to take them down without providing a "legitimate" way to get the same thing. And they waited until there were 4 million websites with lyrics and chords before they decided it was a problem. I don't know if they're just stupid or are more afraid that musicians will start re-doing old material so that people can listen to it again, so now they're going to hide the lyrics. What possible benefit could be derived from this? All they're going to do is prevent musicians from finding lyrics for old tunes they might have otherwise performed. This does no good whatsoever for songwriters. It is actually more likely to hurt them in the long run. The publishers have some kind of dream world they live in where they see musicians being able to find lyrics as a form of theft. They are seeing lost sales from something they didn't even sell in the first place. They are under the illusion that if we can't find them online, we'll all suddenly run down to the local music store and find it in their vast selection. Ain't gonna happen. We'll just play something else. We'll record a different song. The songwriter they claim to be protecting still won't get paid. Now they'll be forgotten, too.