As many of you already know, MXTabs.net is the first site designed to provide musicians with free access to song tabs, while also compensating music publishers and songwriters for their intellectual property. This means that we have individually licensed each and every song that you see displayed on our site, and as a result it means that we perform a LOT of music copyright research to ensure that we are only displaying tabs that we have permission to display.

Not surprisingly, we get many questions from our members inquiring about the licensing availability of Band X or Song Y, particularly in the MXTabs.net Tab Central Forum, where our talented tabbers are known to congregate. Although we’re more than happy to do all of the copyright “dirty work” for them, some have expressed interest in knowing how we go about finding the publisher(s) to a particular song. What follows is a quick look at four of the Basic Music Copyright Resources that we use at MXTabs.net to help determine a song’s publisher.

Three of these four resources are associated with the three performance rights organizations in the United States: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. According to Wikipedia, performance rights organizations “provide intermediary functions, particularly royalty collection, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works publicly.” Luckily for our purposes, they also provide searchable databases that contain songwriter, performer, and publisher information on millions of copyrighted songs. Here are links directly to their databases:

ASCAP ACE Title Search
BMI Repertoire Search
SESAC Repertory Search

Once there, you have the option of searching by song title, songwriter, or artist/performer. One caveat: these searches are somewhat finicky. For example, I just did a title search on ASCAP for “Stairways To Heaven” and it returned no results, but of course “Stairway To Heaven” returned the famous Led Zeppelin song. Similarly, an ASCAP writer search for “Sarah MacLachlan” returned no results, but “Sarah McLachlan” did.

When you have found the song that you’re looking for, you will be able to view the publisher(s) who administer the rights to said song. MXTabs.net has literally thousands of signed contracts with music publishers, so we are unable to list them all here. However, I will say that if you see the words Alfred, Warner, WB, Sony, Bug, MGB, Z-tunes, or Z-songs then chances are that we have rights to display a tab of that particular song. If you have specific questions about what publishers have signed with MXTabs.net, feel free to ask in the comments below, or make a post in the License Availability Thread on the MXTabs.net Forum.

The fourth basic music copyright resource that we use is in many ways similar to the three performance rights organizations listed above. The Harry Fox Agency collects and distributes mechanical license fees on behalf of music publishers, and their website offers a very handy search that can provide you with songwriter, performer, publisher, and album info if you’re having problems finding a song on ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC. Here a link to the HFA database:

HFA Songfile Public Search

Although there are numerous other resources, these four basic music copyright resources should help you immensely in finding the publisher(s) of a particular song, whether you’re curious to see if MXTabs.net can display a certain tab, or whether you want to use a copyrighted song publicly for any reason. As I already mentioned, if you have any questions then please ask away. We’ll do our best to give you a timely and accurate response!