Peter Opaskar plays the tuba and like to make transcriptions
of music for the tuba. He has devised a
sophisticated technique of recording separate sessions of himself and superimposing
them, and idea I have recently considered for the close of my own third Sonata
(to be discussed in more detail later on a Wordpress blog).
But his article in Ars Technica is important because
it shows the tricky problems in trying to monetize on YouTube. At one time he was not allowed to run ads
because his transcriptions were considered copyright infringement. Later, YouTube changed its mind on the maskup
issue, especially after some songwriters indicated they had no objections
(sometimes royalties had to be shared).
But then the composer/transcriber/performer found that
YouTube had a new rule: you couldn’t
monetize until you had a minimum number of unique visitors and visits.
In classical music, transcriptions are sometimes
regarded as legitimate separate compositions (this is most common with
variation sets, or with prelude-and-fugue on a theme, often of Bach). Some composers have said that all composition
involves some copying (rather like my statement in a high school chemistry
class that all learning is memorizing – in organic chemistry, maybe it
is).
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