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."