The website platform: This site is facilitated by the website-platform of Squarespace, and the payment systems by Stripe and PayPal are integrated onto the platform. Hence, basic site-functionality, including the payment systems, is beyond my managing. If there are any problems regarding such matters, I can only direct you towards these service providers, being a mere middle-man.

––––––––––

All is digital: This site sells digital files (PDF, MIDI, XML, MP3) that are downloaded after purchase. The digital files come in a standard ZIP file package. The download-link expires after 24 hours, so please download the files within this time window. This site does not sell or distribute physical paper.

Your ZIP-file is NOT a virus or malware: This summer of 2023, the big internet browsers began flagging all regular ZIP-file downloads as potentially harmful, by default. For someone, like me, whose livelihood literally is selling ZIP-files, this is not good news, and I am powerless against the tech giants’ new policies. What I can do is to assure you: I am not distributing anything fishy (apart for that Wonderwall transcription…).

Guitar Pro source files: These are not included in the products because they are, unfortunately, all too easy to upload elsewhere and spread out of my control. As much as I would like to sell them as well, I simply cannot risk undermining my business by their unauthorized spreading – I hope you understand.

Refunds: Since it is impossible to ‘return’ normal digital files like these, I only refund purchases in cases of a mistaken double purchase or other plain technical errors.

File-importation issues: The MIDI and XML files were invented to be basic file formats compatible with all the different sheet music programs, so that every program could import every file exported by any other program. And this usually does work in practice when every party runs on the newest update of their respective program. However, as software is being developed, incompatibility issues will never be fully eradicated. These issues can only be fixed by the software developers, and not by me. However, I always make sure to run the newest available version of my software, and the check that the files are working – this is the best I can do, I’m afraid.

––––––––––

Dissatisfied?: If you in any way feel dissatisfied with anything on the site – e.g. the quality of the product, transcription mistakes, non-working files, etc. – just mail me at
PlayLikeTheGreats@gmail.com
I will do what I can to restore your sense of satisfaction, within reasonable limits of fairness.

––––––––––

The uniform $5 price: Though all songs take a varying amount of work, their price is uniform, based on the notion that different player-levels or tastes in music should be charged equally.

Transpositions: The job of transposing a song into alternate keys or tunings is beyond the transcriber; the job of the transcriber is only to show how the song is played. For the musicians who wish to transpose, you can, however, do so by importing the midi or xml files into your music software.

––––––––––

My software: The music software used for the transcriptions are Guitar Pro 6, Guitar Pro 7, or Soundslice.

The creator: All transcriptions on site are written entirely and solely by the creator of the site, Jon S. Frederiksen.

Royalties: Regarding royalties, admittedly, I am still in the process of reaching out to establish copyright agreements with the relevant copyrights-holders. I intend and hope that one day every proper penny will land in the hands of every featured artists. Of course!

Until then, I intend for this business to meet an otherwise unmet demand from musicians – fellow musicians who will study the music in detail, teach it, perform it, and thereby promote it, in music schools, online, and on stages all other the world. I also do my utmost to track down the names of the original instrumentalists in order to credit them properly; this is part of a broader movement of recovering the identities of uncredited musicians, whose skills and arrangements have often made compositions come alive and been the key to success of songs.

My copyrights journey, however, has turned out nearly impassable because of the decentralized organization of the music publishing industry today. Firstly, there is no simple »copyrights tip jar«, as some people assume. A formal contract must be written up beforehand, which is usually where the process is aborted by the copyrights holder. And, secondly, even if they do find the financial incentive and legal work-hours to continue, then that would only be the beginning: Because, thirdly, the copyrights to a song is often split between several copyrights-holders – sometimes the rights to each instrument on recording are even split up. So, even when all relevant parties agree, that process can take years – again, just for one song. (One would be forgiven for suspecting that the sheet-music copyrights industry is more about quota profits than servicing the artists.) So, unsurprisingly, this has turned out to be quite a bureaucratic journey, which will not be over in a day.

There are good reasons for this predicament of the copyrights-holders publishers; here is a short version of the bigger picture. The sheet-music publishing industry took a big blow in the early-2000s, when access to the internet spread, and it has been in a shambles of decentralization since then. In these early years of the internet, when the World Wide Web was still the Wild West, its unregulated nature allowed the 1990s’ online culture of niche forums with free DIY music transcriptions to grow into vast databases with transcriptions by the millions. As these free DIY databases obviously circumvented the copyright system and the distribution monopoly of the music publishers, and as they grew in size and quality, they grew into fatal competitors. (Interestingly, the databases also tended to change ideologically: from innocent DIY communities online, to Silicon-Valley-libertarianist businesses. I can recommend reading the Wikipedia-article on Ultimate Guitar – one of the surviving databases from this era.) While many of these databases have now been shut down, other innovative formats have continued to emerge, free tutorials on YouTube, independent educators on Patreon, etc., and new formats will probably continue to undercut the pre-internet business model of the sheet-music publishing industry. (This wave of »free-stuff-online disrupting the establishment« washed over many other industries as well, e.g. Napster that ruined the industry of record stores.)
Today, the legal copyrights are still being signed over by the record companies to the big publishing houses by default, but the publishers rarely make use of them like they did before the early-2000s. You hardly see the “official book” anymore, unless the artists themselves make it. (With no official publications in existence, my transcriptions are not in competition with any official source – I do my best to avoid that!) My best explanation of the publishers’ predicament of having »idle copyrights« is that their classic production model (employment contracts, fair working hours, workers’ rights, etc.) is no longer lucrative, and that leaves them little financial incentive to publish much in general – even less incentive to gamble on publishing for smaller artists.

The demand for good transcriptions and educational material has not disappeared, of course, so the supply has been largely replaced by the innumerable unofficial grassroots transcribers like myself that you see everywhere on Patreon, Ultimate-Guitar, YouTube, etc. The DIY generation has grown up and become the new professionals, albeit without contracts. Most of my working hours are, indeed, terribly underpaid and driven mostly by my own incentive of musical education and curiosity. My justification for running this business is therefore simple: The internet will continue to flood the market with free and lower-quality transcriptions (and the internet is here to stay), so grassroots sites like this one makes the best of a bad situation.