This Site could be better

Dear Guitar Tricks,
Hi my name is Mike. I've been coming and going to this site for a few years whenever I'm stuck or learning something new. All of your files for anything on guitar, I've noticed, are not open for anyone to just look at like they use to be. You now have to pay a monthly fee of $5. Sure it's cheap but take to mind I (and anybody else whose pist) don't have that money. Have you all become money-hungry just like everyone else in the corporate world. Whatever the reason it sucks.

Hahahaha, I'm gonna let Schmange have this one. If you can't afford $5 a month then you might as well give up in life.

Ok... I'll weigh in my 40 cents.
The site was totally free for about 5 years. For instance, we'd publish the entire songs or tabs along with MP3 files.
Over the years, we've made it a point to hire the absolute best guitar players on the web to post lessons here.

Unfortunately, due to recent legislation, a whole bunch of Tab sites have been legally shut down for publishing copyrighted tabs.

We don't want to take the chance that our site gets shut down, so we did a major overhall of every trick on the site (not an easy task since there's over 3000 over them).
We've tried our best to weed out any copyrighted material. In the meantime, just incase if legal problems, we've had to hide the member lessons just in case of copyright infringment.
There's a whole legal page listed here that goes over the legalities of this

http://www.guitartricks.com/updates.php

http://www.guitartricks.com/legal.php

Basically, to boil it down... we're allowed to print small excerpts of copyright files as long as they are being used as exercises and part of a lesson.
Anything more, and we may end up in trouble.

So the short answer is, unfortunately we have to post just small portions of copyright text...
The advantage, is that the other tabs may be abailalbe

Jesus wept.

I think schmange has it a little mixed up. For the record: We never posted whole songs here. The copyright review is a minor part of changes we have made. Although hearing about it does give you an idea of what we have to do to make sure we are running a good site.

For several years we did this site for free, but it was getting worse not better. Here are a couple reasons:

1. no money to pay for a real designer
2. no money to pay for serving large files like videos
3. popup ads required to pay the basic bills
4. instructors who don't get paid teach whatever they want, not what people need, therefore no beginner stuff
5. good instructors get sick of teaching you for free and leave
6. no money to pay for someone to review every single lesson to make sure it is good quality and won't land us in legal trouble
7. no money to pay for someone to answer all the email

I think schmange is wanting to be a nice guy about it, but the bottom line is we didn't want to do this for free anymore. The other bottom line is we weren't doing a very good job for free, we needed to spend our time getting paid somewhere else and we had to let this site suffer.

There are still a lot of great sites with free lessons. But if you want one place with lots of material, with videos, edited and managed, with customer support if you have trouble, no popups, etc., we can do that for five bucks.

I don't know about any of the other instructors, but I am much more proud of this site now than when it was "anything goes."

Personally I'm more than happy to contribute my five bucks a month. I think anyone who complains about it either A: doesn't have a job and can't afford to pay it and just wants to whine, or B: Is a cheapskate, plain and simple. ;)

Originally Posted by: bigbudaPersonally I'm more than happy to contribute my five bucks a month. I think anyone who complains about it either A: doesn't have a job and can't afford to pay it or B: Is a cheapskate, plain and simple. ;)

I would be option A (although [U]I [/U] don't complain about it ;) )

Originally Posted by: Rsam16I would be option A (although [U]I [/U] don't complain about it ;) )

I edited my post, it seemed a little directed at people without a job. :o

I thought I would chime in as well. I've owned a hosting business for the better part of five years. I have over 100 customers and I have my own photography site that sees over 1 million hits a month. My site serves up thousands of low res images a month that users have posted to be critiqued by other members. This can be a very costly affair.

Currently, just my hosting bills each month are over 100 dollars (out of my own pocked minus a few small donations we receive). Not to mention all the time me and my two moderators contribute each week to making things work.

Mike, if you think someone charging 5 bucks a month to serve up this many mp3's and videos is money hungry, you have a thing or two to learn about managing a website. For a site of this caliber, 5 bucks is cheap for what you get in return. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. It's your option. For instance, you can go and download copyrighted stuff in hundreds of other places. Go for it.

Personally, I jumped at the chance to give these guys my 5 bucks when I saw the resources here consolidated in one spot which would allow me to advance my learning that much faster.

Logging on and attacking the wonderful folks who contribute to this site, asking them if they are money hungry, clearly explains your lack of knowledge in this field. Furthermore, it's folks like you, who keep admin/owners from every being able to fully realize their vision of a successful site that actually adds value to the user's 'Internet Experience' because you feel a quality site should be free. They're not Google for 'crap's sake'!

I also just noticed that it's your first post. Must be some punk lurker who is jealous that mommy and daddy bought him a cheap 'axe' when he expected them to just hand him the Gibson. hahahaha

I'm done.

K-Thx-bye!

> I think schmange has it a little mixed up.

Actually, schmange had a few too many beers in him. :rolleyes: