UnitedWeTab Brings Legally Licensed Guitar Tabs to the Masses

West Village, Manhattan: You’re a guitarist, and you need to learn how to play that classic rock song your band is covering. Where do you go? You’ll probably head to one of the many free, user-submitted, unlicensed guitar tablature sites which have become common destinations for guitarists looking to learn popular songs.

Todd Gilman

According to Todd Gilman, CEO of NYC-based web startup UnitedWeTab, over 500 million pieces of unlicensed guitar tablature are viewed every year. Gilman looked at this staggering statistic and saw a big problem – and a big opportunity – for music publishers.

UnitedWeTab is a new website which aims to bring high quality, legally licensed guitar tablature and sheet music to the masses, and deliver the royalties to publishers who are currently seeing nothing from the free, unlicensed sites. The site launched in public Beta last Wednesday, 4/7.

UnitedWeTab charges one dollar per song. That dollar will get a guitarist access to the tablature, sheet music, and a set of videos with professional guitarists demonstrating each part of the song – all of which can be played back at full speed or slower tempos via the site’s proprietary software.

“Everything is moving to the cloud,” said Gilman in a recent interview at UnitedWeTab’s West Village offices, explaining how all of the site’s content is stored and accessed solely on the internet. Once a guitarist purchases the sheet music to a song, they will have access to it from any computer with an internet connection. At launch users are not able to store content locally on their own hard drives.

Entering a market where the vast majority of the content is already available for free, Gilman and the UnitedWeTab staff were forced to answer a question much of the industry is reckoning with in the internet age: How do we compete with free? For tablature, Gilman believes the answer lies in quality.

The 500 million unlicensed tabs which get viewed each year are, Gilman says, “nowhere near correct in most cases.” UnitedWeTab offers complete, accurate tablature, with music provided for all guitar parts in a song.

Publishers initially signed on for licensing agreements with UnitedWeTab include EMI, Kobalt and Bug Music; the site offers music from majors as well as indies. The decision of what songs to include on the site comes in part from the company’s proprietary algorithms, which factor in internet buzz and sales data, but at the end of the day Gilman says the decision of what to put on the site comes down to “a gut feeling.”

UnitedWeTab offers a combination of new releases such as Phoenix, Owl City, and Them Crooked Vultures as well as legacy artists such as Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, and The Eagles.

Marketing to 18-34 year old males, UnitedWeTab’s core demographic, has traditionally proved challenging – Gilman says that using traditional marketing would not make sense for this demographic, who is of the “don’t tell me what to do” mentality. To spread the word about the new option of high quality, legal tablature, all of the site’s videos of guitarists demonstrating the songs will be uploaded to YouTube and available to view for free. Each video will be linked to a page where the viewer can then purchase the sheet music for the song. UnitedWeTab found that 20% of the search for sheet music begins and ends on YouTube, so for them it was a market that couldn’t be ignored.

Whether publishers and artists will see any significant bump in income from the site remains to be seen. But in a time when album sales can no longer to be counted on to bring in royalties, exploring every possible revenue stream is becoming not just a good idea, but a necessity.

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