Beatles Lyrics you say? - Doc Searls writes that "if you're looking for Beatles lyrics on the Web, good fucking luck. Try clicking on any of the links here. You can find some, but there are a lot of dead ends. Why? Seems the copyright police don't want us to remember completely the words that were burned into our brains over all those years."
He's right that many sites that put up lyrics and chords were harrassed by the copyright holders, and dropped out of existence. One organization that took heat was OLGA (online guitar archives, or something like that) which is still in existence. Let's see. [quick Google search] Yep. They have Beatles lyrics. Anyway, I think that Doc is right that many of these sites were legally threatened by copyright holders. I guess some are still around. But OLGA is not the only site that has lyrics and chords. If you want lyrics or chords for the Beatles just type "beatles guitar tabs" into Google and you'll find a site like this.
I use sites like that whenever I'm learning a song on the guitar and I don't feel like sitting down with the recording and writing down the words and then figuring out the chords. I know that listening to the song and writing down the words actually makes me pay attention more and so the lyrics stick with me better. But I'm lazy so I use the sites to find the lyrics so I can concentrate on the easy part: figuring out the chords. But Doc's post really doesn't ask how to figure out songs. He mentions the copyright issues, which I'm aware of but don't much care about when I want to learn a new song.
So what sort of copyright violation is the person who helps me figure out the chords and lyrics engaging in? I don't know. I suppose that the music publishing companies would say it represents a grave threat. I say that's overblown. I have been learning songs from friends and, in turn, teaching others songs for years. To teach people you usually write out the lyrics and then scribble the chords over the words. Or you make a copy of lyrics that you have previously written down with a copy machine. Horrors!
Well, this sort of thing has been going on for years. And...get this (are you sitting down?), this is how people have been learning music for years. What's changed is that the Internet has made it easier for people to teach larger groups of people. And the people who sell the music are concerned that this may affect their sales. Again it is a strange situation because if there was an "official" site that sold the lyrics and chords for a reasonable sum (Perhaps $1 per song) I might be conditioned to go to the official site.
Here's what would inhibit my conditioning: (1) an "official" site that had a very limited selection of songs; and (2) trying to raise the price per song by offering more information than I wanted (i.e. complete musical notation). I'm sure that the music publishing companies won't offer any music online because like all content providers they are scared witless about the power of the Internet. They are used to having very perfect control over the sale of their works, and the Internet does not currently allow them perfect control.
Actually, it's life in general that stands in the way of perfect control. Music, law, whatever. Perfect control is not only unattainable, it's undesirable. I remember watching a young musician learn this lesson from Wynton Marsalis. As I recall, Wynton was teaching a group of young classical musicians about how to approach the art of performance. One of the kids was obssessing about a mistake that he made. Wynton told him that he was too concerned about making a mistake, and that his fear --and nothing more-- was what was holding him back.
Wynton told the kid a story about classical music performance that he gave at the Lincoln Center (or some equally renowned music hall). After the performance a music critic came up to him and rhapsodized about how much he liked the performance. But, then, he leaned into Wynton and said "I did hear that one wrong note that you played at the beginning of the second movement." Wynton said "well that's great, because you may have 'heard' it, but I 'felt' it." Wynton's lesson is worth learning. Great musicians know that perfection isn't possible, and even though they strive for it, they also strive for something greater, that is more readily attainable: Passion. But, of course, that has nothing to do with copyright law.
