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How much would you pay for a 3 string songbook?

Posted by Patrick Curley on October 10, 2014 at 7:01am in Performances, How to Play, Lessons, Concerts

Hi Folks

Any music shop you go into has rows and rows of books full of arrangements for guitar, piano etc of Beatles songs, Stones, Zep, you name it but there's nothing for 3 string guitars. There are countless youtube videos, most of which are pretty basic, but there is still no substantial resource of material for our instrument.

I'm looking at remedying this situation with a series of quality arrangements such as this one.

The thing is that I'm not prepared to rip off the copyright owners and so there's a considerable up front cost in licensing the original works. Hence my question.

Would you pay $20 to $30 for a book of 10 arrangements? Given the licensing costs I can't do them for much cheaper/

If so what would you prefer? Classic Rock, Blues, Country? Which artists?

Thanks in advance.

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Replies

  • Smokin elFish November 3, 2014 at 4:31pm

    I would to suggest to do a bit of everything ? So almost everyone will have their favorit :)

  • Tom T November 2, 2014 at 3:53pm

    Hi Patrick.

    Great idea, especially for us newbies. A well tabbed songbook for open-tuned three-strings would be a great help for us. I think you could test out your idea with"Volume 1" which could be ten blues classics (Stormy Monday, Death Letter Blues, Mean Old World, etc). Classic blues tunes such as that will always find an audience. You might be able to find ten classic tunes that are past copyright and now public domain. It's worth a look see. If you get good support for volume 1, the maybe some copyrighted material could be in Volume 2. You may become a Brand.........

    Good Luck

  • Graham Alibone October 17, 2014 at 5:17pm

    Hi Patrick, I could go 25 dollars for 10 blues or country songs. To save postage you could send in an attachment in an e-mail.   'fingers'

  • Ron "Oily" Sprague October 15, 2014 at 4:15am
    Would you have to pay licensing fees if you tabbed the arrangements out yourself? Or why not access the OLGA tab archive, retab songs for 3 string, and then offer the book for sale? Problem from a cost production standpoint for an actual tab book for those aforementioned groups is you can pick up the book with at least 50 songs in it for $14.99 -$25.99. Which means you then need to reduce your costs ( and your profit) by not printing, but putting it out in e-book format.
    • Patrick Curley > Ron "Oily" Sprague October 15, 2014 at 5:02am

      Looking at ebooks for sure.

      To do this properly I'd need to license the songs, even if I write the arrangements. I know there are tabs everywhere but they are breaking copyright laws and I'm not into that.

      Looks like the best way to go is to make it a premium product with complex arrangements for more adventurous players, a whole lot more than listing the chords and leaving the rest to you, or anything that's currently on youtube. This reduces the target market quite a bit but fits into the overall plan a lot better. I'll keep the simpler stuff free on my youtube channel.

      Thanks heaps for helping with this folks. Any more ideas plaease keep them coming.

      • Tommy Phillips > Patrick Curley October 20, 2014 at 2:11pm

        I would like to say, Patrick, that I appreciate your attention to the legal niceties here.

        There is no doubt that copyright law has serious problems, not just in the USA, but world-wide.  But the way to address those problems is not by violating licenses and making copyright protest seem sleazy.

        As for how much I would be willing to pay for a book of blues/country/class-rock song tabs for a 3-string fretless slide tuned open G? Considering how much time it would save me in trying to read music or tabs, and translate to something my fingers could manage, I think the $20-$30 range is not completely unreasonable.

        The idea that several have mentioned, of bulking up the book with public domain works, would only make it more attractive to me.

  • Patrick Curley October 15, 2014 at 2:21am

    Mmmmm. At $2 per song I'm paying $50 upfront to license 50 downloads. Paypal takes a cut and I end up with $1.65c out of every sale. Take out the $1 it cost me in the first place and the profit is .65c per sale.  Then I have to fork out another $50 for 50 more downloads.

    Given the amount of work in counting the numbers, keeping track of what licences are where, finding the copyright owners etc.

    May not happen.

  • George Forster October 14, 2014 at 9:43pm

    $2 a song seems like a good deal.  $ 20 for a book of 10 songs...seems like the same math.  But, I would prefer to buy single songs.

  • Scruggy October 14, 2014 at 9:15pm
    $20-30 does seem a bit pricey but in saying that you are dead right that there is little or nothing out there apart from few short videos on a few riff not full songs or tabs! It's guna be hard to pls most people in song choice if it was all rock I'd easily pay that but if a lot are of songs that don't apeal to me then no! What if you could do a few books of different genres then I think more would buy the specific music they like and if they like two or more genres then your golden!
  • TN Twang October 13, 2014 at 2:54pm

    If ya' haven't contacted them already, get in touch with The Copyright Company in Nashville, TN (USA). 

    http://www.thecopyrightco.com/about.html

    Tell 'em you want to be a print music publisher, and see what kind of suggestions they can come up with. They make money off of both the songwriters and the publishers, but their services can be invaluable.

    I also know that some print publishers mingle their copyrighted material with out-of-copyright folk, sacred, etc. so they can offer books with more titles and not have to pay royalties for all of them.

    Oh, and thanks for patronizing a Tennessee business!! (We need the money.)

    TN Twang

    PS $20 is way too high. Make it $19.96 and it'll fly.

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