If you are a guitar author—a starving artist who spent 400 hours notating The Complete Styles of Pat Metheny —seeing your work on VK with 50,000 downloads and zero royalties is devastating. Publishers have tried to fight it. DMCA takedowns on VK are like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. The files are re-uploaded ten minutes later with a different Cyrillic filename.
And nobody is talking about it. Let’s set the stage. The guitar book industry is broken. A typical method book costs $25. A niche transcription of a Joe Pass album? $30. A collection of Baroque lute suites transcribed for six-string? $40, if you can find a print-on-demand copy from a publisher in Germany that takes six weeks to ship. guitar books vk
The Stacks of VK: Why the World’s Largest Guitar Library is Hiding in a Russian Social Network If you are a guitar author—a starving artist
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just found a PDF of a 1978 guitar method written by a session musician in Leningrad. The exercises are in Cyrillic. I have no idea what "Бенд на целый тон" means, but it sounds fast. Do you use VK for guitar tabs? Or do you think it’s killing the industry? Sound off in the comments (but please, no DMCA notices). The files are re-uploaded ten minutes later with
For the last ten years, if you asked a seasoned guitarist where to find the "Holy Grail" of sheet music or a long out-of-print jazz etude book, they would whisper a secret. They wouldn’t say "Amazon." They wouldn’t say "Sheet Music Plus." They’d smile and type three letters:
But as long as publishers refuse to offer affordable, DRM-free digital copies of their back catalogs, the VK stacks will remain. The torrent will not stop.
No, I’m not talking about the social network where you share memes with your cousins in Minsk. I’m talking about VKontakte as the digital Alexandria of guitar pedagogy. It is the largest, most chaotic, most legally ambiguous, and most comprehensive guitar library the world has ever seen.