MXTabs.net was an American music tablature website created in 1999, offering free guitar, bass, and drum tablature created by users of the site, in addition to music reviews and instrument lessons. Although the site shut down in June 2006 in response to claims made by the Music Publishers Association (MPA) about the supposed illegality of music tabs, it has since been bought by MusicNotes and now offers free, legal tablature. The site was in public-alpha stage for some time as not all features had been added and tabs were available only to countries where a licence was in place. The site came out of public alpha stage and was launched on 1 July 2008. The site is now defunct and the domain name redirects to Songsterr, which has no relation to MXTabs. History Mxtabs started out as a hobby drum website in 1999 by a young musician attempting to learn drums. As the site grew in size and popularity, it added subsites for guitar and bass guitar. Users would submit tablature for a song, and that tab would be incorporated into the website. Mxtabs continued to grow, increasing its database to over 150,000 tabs by December 2005, when the Music Publishers Association threatened websites that provided lyrics or tabs with jail time in addition to fines and shutting the websites down. However, the MPA took no legal action at that time, only warning that they would begin doing so in 2006. Mxtabs responded on December 26, 2005 by taking their entire website offline. Later, the website was changed to simply forward viewers to its affiliate forum, MusicianForums. On February 24, 2006, the owners of Mxtabs put the website back online with a letter explaining their position. In short, they believe that the purpose of Mxtabs is to "aid musicians in learning their instruments." They say that Mxtabs has accounted for as much as $3000 a month in sheet music sales, and offers many tabs that do not have equivalent sheet music published, so Mxtabs and similar sites are the only place that musicians can find a way to play these songs. The letter concludes by pointing out that tabs have never been proven to be illegal, then requesting that sheet music companies contact Mxtabs in order to create a system of tab licensing. On June 25, 2006, the administrators of Mxtabs took the tablature offline once more. The website remained