Starting in 2017, Ultimate Guitar – a Russian guitar tabs website – started going on a shopping spree: They acquired MuseScore, an open source notation program, Audacity, the Audacity audio editor, Hal Leonard, a sheet music publisher, StaffPad, AmpKit, and others.
Throughout all of this time, they have continuously enshittified their offerings with unethical and illegal practices. The following document documents various illegal and unethical actions, behaviors and designs this company uses to squeeze more money out of their users, without the users realizing.
Ultimate Guitar
Ultimate guitar is a guitar tab sharing site. It hosts text content – literally with formatting so simple, it can be done with a typewriter – much of which is user generated. As such, it very likely is very profitable even without employing unethical practices, and with the unethical and illegal practices employed likely absurdly so.
Illegal and unethical action count
1. Countdown timers creating a sense of urgency
Screenshots: UG-1, UG-8, UG-10, UG-11, UG-12, UG-13
These timers create a needless sense of urgency, as if you’re about to pass on an amazing offers. This behavior is unethical, and illegal under the following laws:
The EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive lists in the section titled “COMMERCIAL PRACTICES WHICH ARE IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES CONSIDERED UNFAIR”:
“(Annex I, point 7) Falsely stating that a product will only be available for a very limited time, or that it will only be available on particular terms for a very limited time, in order to elicit an immediate decision and deprive consumers of sufficient opportunity or time to make an informed choice.”
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02005L0029-20220528
2. Wrong calculations for the rebate
Screenshot: UG-2 and UG-8
Selling a 300€ item for 80% off means you should pay 60€, not 65€. UG hopes you don’t notice the mismatch and just pay a bit more.
3. Accepting the rebate increases the base price
Screenshot: UG-2 and UG-3
Selling the same item for 100€, but adjusting the base price to 300€ when someone picks the 80% off option is unethical and probably also illegal.
4. The rebate rate keeps changing
Screenshot: UG-8 and UG-9
Clicking on a button promising 85% off takes you to a page which suddenly only offers 80% off. Again, unethical and probably illegal.
Screenshots and context
When accessing UG, the first thing you see is likely this:
Screenshot UG-1
Note the countdown timer at the top. This countdown is Bullshit: The sale is *always* on and never ends.
Once you do “get special offer”, you create an account and get presented with this:
Screenshot UG-2
Usually 300€, but only 65€ thanks to the discount.
80% off 300€ is 60€, not 65€.
However, look at what happens when you click the “spring sale” toggle, or the “rather buy a monthly option” link:
Screenshot UG-3
Usually 100€, but you get a 7-day free trial.
The full price suddenly has been declared to be 100€, not 300€ as seen in the previous screen.
Just for completeness sake: the original “80% off” offering is actually a 35% offer, which, if you take it, makes the subscription 200% MORE expensive starting from the second year.
Let’s continue. We start a 7 day free trial:
Screenshot UG-4
And once going through the billing, get to this screen:
Screenshot UG-5
Another 80% off 7-day free trial!
Note the Dark Pattern here: I see a “start 7 day free trial” button, but the “no thanks” button is nowhere to be seen. Instead it’s a tiny, greyed out X in a corner.
Also notice that it promises 80% off, but neither tells you the base price, or the off price.
Screenshot UG-6
Only now do I learn it’s actually 100€/year. This is at least confusing: Nowhere before the payment screen did I get to see this info. And I also am primed from the prior offer (“80% off” being 65€), so I might be thinking it’s a different price.
When trying to cancel the subscription, I of course get hit with this gem:
Screenshot UG-7
Again a dark pattern: The big button is a payment *reminder* (ie: they don’t even tell you if you forget to cancel your free trial by default!), and an asshole pattern – once you cancel, you lose access immediately, and not at the end of your free trial.
Also note that you still can switch to the 35% off (but actually 200% more expensive) plan with the button below.
OK, let’s cancel all that and delete the account and delete cookies. Let’s go to a tab page instead:
Screenshot UG-8
80% or 85% off? The page advertises both. Let’s go to the 85% offer:
Screenshot UG-9
Look at that, it’s only 80% anyway!
But maybe this is just a one-time thing. A honest mistake. Let’s look at some past offerings using the wayback machine:
Screenshot UG-10
Ohey, 80% off, less than 1 day remaining.
Screenshot UG-11
2022, less than 1 day remaining, 80% off
Screenshot UG-12
2021, less than a day remaining, 80% off
And finally, having waited for the countdown from UG-1 and UG-8 to end:
Screenshot UG-13
Musescore.com
The situation on musescore.com is broadly identical to Ultimate Guitar. Very light-weight content, most of which is user-generated, and profitable – doubly so with the massive amounts of unethical behavior.
Illegal and unethical action count
5. Countdown timers creating a sense of urgency
Screenshots: MS-1, MS-2, MS-3, MS-5
These timers create a needless sense of urgency, as if you’re about to pass on an amazing offers. This behavior is unethical, and illegal under EU law (see point 1, from UG)
6. Switching to the rebated price changes “12 months” to “12 weeks”
Screenshot: MS-2, MS-3
The text sneakily changes from “12 months” to “12 weeks”, giving the impression of a discount while you’re only getting a quarter of the service duration.
7. Accepting the rebate increases the base price
Screenshot: MS-2, MS-3
Selling the same item for 600kr, but adjusting the base price to 1350kr when someone picks the 75% off option is unethical and probably also illegal.
8. Wrong calculations for the rebate
Screenshot: MS-2, MS-3, MS-4
Just as with Ultimate Guitar, Musescore.com uses very questionable maths to justify their pricing.
Screenshots and context
We again start on the home page
Screenshot MS-1
We are again greeted by a tight countdown, this time with a 90% offering. We’ll get into that one below, though it might be a good idea to first check out the “Start free trial” button instead:
Screenshot MS-2
Stop me if you’ve seen this before – A free trial which automatically becomes a 604kr year-long problem, and if you forget to cancel that they even upgrade that to 733 kr for you instead.
But thankfully we have our Lucky Thursday deal with 75% off – hang on, wasn’t that 90% a second ago? – so let’s activate it!
Screenshot MS-3
Again, the base price magically increased from 604kr before to now somehow 1368kr, but we’re paying only 344kr. If we do the math, it 75% off 1368kr actually should be 342kr, but this one I’m letting slide as a mere rounding error.
However, they’ve been sneaking something in here. If we compare screenshots MS-2 and MS-3, we see that all of the sudden, the discount changed from 12 months to 12 weeks!
If we don’t take the “75% off”, we pay 604kr for a year, but if we do take the “discounted” offer, we actually pay upwards of 1376kr! That’s a 230% increase!
And no, it’s not a typo – this sort of language is everywhere. For example, here’s the thing you get when clicking on the banner (which doesn’t even show you the free trial):
Screenshot MS-4
12 weeks again, math again doesn’t check out:
Also note that the maths again doesn’t check out, though this time to a degree that appears to be decided by the roll of some dice: 75% off 114 kr is 28,5 kr, not 6.59. 6.59 for 12 weeks is 79,08 kr, not 344.
And of course, “Billed every 12 weeks at kr 344” is a lie as the fineprint says that only the first 12-week period is 344 kr, after that it increases to 474 kr. – A 37% price increase (on top of the 230% from earlier!)
Navigating away from that mess, I suddenly get greeted with yet another, very tight timer:
Screenshot MS-5
Aha, 90%? Let’s check it out:
Screenshot MS-6
This appears to be the first genuine discount, with the 344kr number we’ve seen earlier actually applying per year, rather than 12 weeks. Though with all of the foregoing it almost feels like this is the screen where they made the mistake.
Audacity
While Audacity has added some ads to the app (screenshots AU-1, AU-2), which for an open source project which historically was free of ads is strange, it’s not yet hyper-unethical. The dark patterns are though.
Total action count
9. Fake download buttons
Screenshots: AU-3
The design of the website makes it seem like you’re downloading Audacity when in reality it downloads MuseHub. The user is deceived.
10. Dark patterns in the Audacity app
Screenshots: AU-4
When opening up Audacity, you’re immediately greeted by a screen asking you to “complete your Audacity cloud setup with audio.com”, with a progress bar and a big “continue” button. This makes it seem like it is necessary to use Audacity, but it only is to get you to sign up to the audio.com subscription.
Screenshots and context
First there was a button to “upload audio” in the toolbar.
Screenshot AU-1
Then interstitials for the audio.com platform were introduced: You go to File -> Save project, and instead of saving it locally, you get shown the following screen – a similar dialog gets shown if you try to export an MP3:
Screenshot AU-2
At some other point Audacity website got dark patterns added, too: Does the nice, big, yellow button download Audacity?
Screenshot AU-3
Of course not.
With Audacity 3.7.4, Audacity has crossed a red line and introduced a clear dark pattern into their app. When you start it up, you’re greeted with this screen:
Screenshot AU-4![]()
The “Continue” button doesn’t actually continue you on your user journey of using Audacity – instead you’re being signed up to their cloud subscription thing.
MuseScore Studio
Just like Audacity, MuseScore Studio now has ads (Screenshots MSS-1, MSS-2, MSS-3).
Illegal and unethical action count
11. Fake download buttons
Screenshots: MSS-4
The design of these dialogs and buttons make it seem like you’re doing one thing (downloading Audacity, continuing using Audacity) when in reality you’re doing another thing (downloading “MuseHub”, signing up for an optional cloud service). That there is some text suggesting the dark pattern is happening doesn’t detract from the fact that there is an unethical and probably illegal dark pattern happening here.
Screenshots and context
The MuseScore story looks very similar to Audacity. We have ads:
Screenshot MSS-1
We have buttons to “export” to the platforms:
Screenshot MSS-2
We have interstitials:
Screenshot MSS-3
And we have dark patterns on the website:
Screenshot MSS-4
What now?
To Muse Group
Cut the shit and play above board. Just because your shitty “experiments” have found a formula can extract maximum money out of your customers doesn’t mean you should stoop to new depths of enshittification and unethical behavior to get them.
Additionally, spin off Audacity and Musescore Studio into a foundation. While I trust the Audacity and MuseScore Studio teams individually (I used to be one of them), I do not have faith in the leadership of Eugeny Naidenov, founder of Ultimate Guitar and CEO of Muse Group to run open source projects ethically.
To media
Please share this story far and wide. You can contact me via media@leoxd.dk.
To readers
- Please contact Muse Group to stop their deceptive practices.
- You may also want to contact your consumer protection authority to investigate potentially illegal behavior.
Leo Wattenberg 