Gracenote strikes deal on lyrics
Music warehouser to buck free sites, take legal path to offering words to songs online
The deal is music to Scott Jones’ ears.
The Indianapolis entrepreneur’s company, Gracenote, has signed an agreement with hundreds of music publishers to offer song lyrics over the Web. Likely customers include Apple’s iTunes, Real Networks’ Rhapsody and other online music stores that let people buy songs legally and store them on their MP3 players.
Terms were not disclosed, but Jones, who is chairman of Gracenote’s board, called the deal “good.”
No wonder.
What Gracenote offers is the first legal alternative to the legions of lyrics Web sites that violate copyright law.
Some of those sites are band- specific and are run by fans. But others, such as www.seekalyric.com and www.1songlyrics.com, contain lyrics from hundreds of bands and exist solely to make money.
It’s the latter, advertising-driven segment of sites that the Music Publishers’ Association wants gone.
Last year, the association’s president, Lauren Keiser, said if the operators of those sites were facing “jail time, I think we’ll be a little more effective.”
Jail may be a stretch, but not lawsuits.
“There’s no doubt you’re going to see the free sites attempted to be shut down,” said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director for Jupiter Research.
He predicted things will play out as they did for the Recording Industry Association of America. Once iTunes and other legitimate music stores were on the scene, the association, which represents music labels, filed lawsuits to shut down file-sharing networks.
That doesn’t mean song lyrics are going to disappear from the Internet. Web sites run by fans probably won’t be bothered, analysts said.
“Music lyrics are available, they have been available, and no number of lawsuits is going to change that,” said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
That means that, for Gracenote to succeed, to get people to stop searching Google for lyrics, the company’s services have to be better than free.
“The music publishers face the same challenges the record labels do: They have to compete with free,” von Lohmann said. “Obviously, it can be done; iTunes does it every day.”
For the moment, Emeryville, Calif.-based Gracenote isn’t going head to head with lyrics Web sites. It’s going around them.
The company is negotiating to expand existing deals with Apple, Real Networks, Yahoo!, AOL, Napster and consumer electronics manufacturers. That means by year’s end, songs downloaded from online music stores may come with lyrics, in addition to the typical selection of album art.
Gracenote, founded eight years ago, is best known for operating the world’s largest online database of music information: 4 million albums and 55 million songs.
iTunes and other programs tap into Gracenote’s database to label music with song and album information. It’s how your Web- connected computer recognizes what CD you just stuck in it.
Adding lyrics to Gracenote’s jukebox of services has been a goal for years, Jones said.
“We’ve felt that this is a critical part of the music experience,” said Jones, who made his fortune inventing voice-mail technology.
Convincing music publishers wasn’t easy.
Gracenote had to hunt down hundreds of publishers one by one and negotiate separate deals. In some cases, the publishers didn’t even have the lyrics to the songs they own, so Gracenote employees had to listen to music and transcribe the words.
So far, the company has lyrics to hundreds of thousands of songs. The goal is 1 million.
After years of work, the result is a deal with most of the world’s music publishers including Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG Music Publishing and Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
“It’s a good deal for Gracenote, publishers and ultimately the consumer because they’ll be able to get lyrics legally,” Jones said.