Ultimate Guitar (Ultimate Guitar USA LLC), also known as Ultimate-Guitar.com or simply UG, is an online platform for guitarists and musicians, started on October 9, 1998 by Eugeny Naidenov and based in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

, US. Its website and mobile application provide free and paid user-submitted guitar tablatures and chord sheets, as well as video courses, reviews of music and equipment, interviews with musicians and forums. It is now part of Muse Group.

Features

Users of Ultimate Guitar are able to view, request, vote and comment on tablatures in the site's forum. Guitar Pro and Power Tab files can be run through programs in order to play the tablature. Members can also submit album, multimedia and gear reviews, as well as guitar lessons and news articles. Approved works are published on the website. The forum is moderated, but there has been no censorship of curse and swear words since September 1, 2015. From 2007 until 2014, Ultimate Guitar allowed its users to create profiles, enabling social networking in a way similar to sites such as

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

and

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

. Profiles allowed users to promote their musical projects, photos of gear, snippets of original music, and more. The feature was disabled due to lack of use, as well as legal liability due to

copyright violations Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, ...

Relationships with music publishers and songwriters

In late 2004 to early 2005, after Taborama and MXtabs.net began closing due to legal threats from the Music Publishers Association of America, UG saw a surge of new users flock to the community. UG argued that it was not subject to the MPA legal actions because its headquarters were in Russia and the site’s practices complied with Russian laws. Since then, UG has signed license agreements with thousands of publishers, including Sony, EMI, Peermusic, Alfred, Hal Leonard, Faber and Music Sales, through which the songwriters receive compensation for the display of the tabs. On April 10, 2010, Ultimate Guitar entered an additional licensing agreement with Harry Fox Agency. The agreement included rights for lyrics display, title search and tablature display with download and print capabilities. HFA's over 44,000 represented publishers have the opportunity to opt into the licensing arrangement with UG.

References

External links

*{{Official website Community websites Online archives Guitar websites Internet properties established in 1998 Music Internet forums Muse Group