Ultimate Guitar: The Story of the Biggest Tab Catalog In the World

This article was published to be a reference to other articles about business processes, monetization, company culture, to tell you more about Ultimate Guitar itself.

Ultimate Guitar: The World’s Largest Catalog of Tabs & Chords

The story began in 1998 when Eugeny Naidenov, a student from Kaliningrad, couldn’t find the tablature for his favorite Guns’ N’ Roses song. He created his own and posted it online to share with friends. While no one knew it at the time, this moment forever changed how millions of guitarists would learn to play guitar.

20 years later, the archive that started with only one song has 1,4M tablatures contributed by over 250K guitarists from all over the world who simply want to share their work with fellow musicians. Today Ultimate Guitar offers tabs for songs from various genres, eras, and cultures.

A few years ago UG formed a special team of professional guitarists with the ultimate goal to create Official Tabs with studio-quality backing tracks, synced lyrics, and access to Tonebridge guitar effects. We decided that we don’t want to take the route of many services and sheet music stores who sell digital tabs which are in many cases just scans of printed music, PDFs or semi-editable files. Our goal is to make sure that the tablatures are as much ‘digital’ as possible.

Started in 1998 as a random web page, by 2007 Ultimate Guitar faced the problem of tablature licensing. There was no way to share tabs legally at that time. As true rock ’n’ roll rebels, UG decided to change history. The company began negotiating directly with music publishers and was able to sign the world’s first digital tablature licensing deal. By 2010, Ultimate Guitar had dealt with thousands of music publishers and artists and started earning rights holders millions of dollars annually.

In 2017 Ultimate Guitar acquired MuseScore with the mission to transform it into the world’s largest online destination for legally licensed sheet music. A year later, MuseScore has used Ultimate Guitar’s experience and relationships to successfully negotiate licensing deals with major and independent music publishers alike.

In 2019 Ultimate Guitar are proud to provide tabs for songs owned by Sony/ATV Music, EMI, Alfred, Hal Leonard, Peermusic, Faber and Music Sales. Besides that, UG has a license agreement with The Harry Fox Agency through which tens of thousands of other publishers can grant us rights to their songs and allow users to share guitar tablature. You can find more information about how royalties work in our article here.

If you want to learn more about the digital music industry, Ultimate Guitar business practices, apps, monetization, and much more, stay tuned for our next articles.