I dunno, Alex - have you priced sheet music lately? It seems to me that four or five bucks is too much to pay for a song you're just going to fool around with. Luckily, there's a solution - fakebooks. It used to be that fakebooks were illegal copies, but the music publishers finally figured out they had to do something to supply the need. Warner and Hal Leonard have some terrific fake books. They cost $45 to $50 each, but they have over a thousand songs per volume. They also have extraordinary titles for their books. I found "When I Fall In Love" in Hal Leonard's The Most Amazing Colossal Ultimate Selection of Best Songs Ever Assembled In A Real Legal Fakebook, C Edition. It's also known as "The Book." Actually, I think it has been renamed to something less innovative, and it's part of the Hal Leonard "Ultimate Fakebook" series.

Maybe the same thing will happen with Internet music, as happened with fakebooks. Maybe the publishers will stop trying to control the black market with lawsuits, and they'll come up with a good, legal, reasonably-priced product to fill the need.

-Joe Offer-