Alfred Publishing Offers Catalog on Groundbreaking Guitar World Tabs Site

May 08, 2008

Alfred Publishing has signed an agreement with Future US which grants Future US' acclaimed Guitar World Tabs website the right to offer compositions controlled by Alfred Publishing as guitar tabs, including songs performed by Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Green Day, The Eagles, and Santana.

Guitar World, the world's biggest magazine for guitarists, offers tabs at http://guitarworldtabs.com/. Launched in early January 2008, Guitar World Tabs is devoted to rights-cleared rock guitar tabs and transcriptions funded by pay-per-view and ad supported models. The company's innovative business model creates a fully legal profit center for music publishers and their writers, with valuable new financial streams for songwriters being paid to publishers based on revenue derived for advertising or pay-per-view charges.

"Alfred Publishing is a giant in the music publishing world and their endorsement is significant," say Brad Tolinski, Guitar World's editor-in-chief. "It is a victory for us and a victory for Alfred Publishing artists who will finally be compensated for their online guitar transcriptions."

"Alfred is excited to partner with Future US to help provide thousands of guitarists with a legal way to trade and buy digital guitar tabs on the tabs.guitarworld.com site," says Steven Manus, Alfred's CEO. "We're pleased to find yet another way to embrace new business models to better represent our large roster of artists and their copyrights, while simultaneously helping to empower a new generation of customers to learn, teach, and play music."

Guitar World Tabs' premium tabs feature chords, lyrics, tempo, and often solos and licks, along with rights-cleared, user-created tabs written in ASCII format. Visitors have two options when obtaining tabs:

• Free: Users can access all user-generated tabs and a portion of the Guitar World premium tabs for free tabs, embedded in a customized media player in which they must view an advertisement first. Free tabs cannot be copied, printed, or downloaded.
• Pay-Per-View: For a portion of the premium Guitar World tabs, users will be required to pay a nominal fee of $.59 to $1.49 to view tabs on customized Flash player for a period of 30 days. A tab acquired per pay-per-view cannot be copied, printed, or downloaded.

For more information, visit their web site at www.alfred.com.