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Gracenote licenses legal lyrics
Company that powers the artist, song, and album information for major download services like iTunes will add lyrics to its services.
You're listening to the radio, a song comes on that you dig, and you hear some of the lyrics but not the name of the track.
Gracenote
Until now, your options mostly centered on search engine queries, then a visit to one of the dozens of free--but not music industry-supported--lyric Web sites, and then onto a digital download service or the nearest record store to buy it.
With a deal it announced today, digital music information company Gracenote is hoping to make that process easier and more efficient and hopes to make some cash in the process. The company, which supplies artist, song, album, and related information to major download stores like iTunes, inked a deal with several major music publishing companies, including BMG Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, for the lyrics to more than 1 million songs to include in the service they offer those downloads shops.
Gracenote said it was in talks with download stores it powers, such as iTunes and Yahoo Music Unlimited, to add lyrics to its offering.
"When we first approached the publishers with this, they were excited. They thought lyrics had been an untapped resource for them and there's quite a bit of lyrics being taken for free on the Web," Gracenote exec Ross Blanchard told Reuters.
Although the aforementioned scenario is less common now as people consume their music in a variety of digital forms, Gracenote is counting on the fact that the option of going to iTunes, typing in lyrics, finding and buying a song will boost digital music sales. The company also has audio recognition software that could, for instance, allow a user to hold up a cell phone to a speaker and find a song that way.
What it'll all cost the user is unclear, as iTunes and others will have to determine how much of the increased cost of the Gracenote service is passed on to the consumer.
"We anticipate that you'll see different kinds of offers in the market, where lyrics are combined with recorded music in a total package like a subscription. This extra element should help drive sales growth. There are a lot of ways the services will derive value outside of adding an extra charge," Blanchard told Reuters.
Ralph Peer II, Firth's counterpart at music publishing firm peermusic told Reuters that licensing lyrics should boost worldwide music publishing revenues, estimated at about $4 billion annually.
As a legal lyric market begins, the heat on unauthorized lyric sites like www.lyrics.com) and www.azlyrics.com, largely ignored by the industry to date, could increase. But it won't likely come without a fight. When Warner/Chappell threatened to shut down pearLyrics, a Web-based tool that displays song lyrics of the track currently played in iTunes by searching the file itself or publicly available Web sites, digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation loudly opposed the action and it fizzled.
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