Lyrics Go Legal Online

A new legal service aims to oust all those unauthorised lyric sites – but can it find traction?

You’ve probably not given a great deal of thought to song lyrics, other than when one is stuck in your head and you go online to find the name of the tune.   But it seems that lyrics sites, most of them unauthorized, are big business, and music publishers are getting upset. According to figures, in the early part of May in the U.K., half of the 25 most-visited music sites were either for lyrics or guitar tablature.   Now the music publishers have finally muscled their way into the market with Gracenote, a service hosted by Yahoo! It has a database of some 400,000 lyrics, all legally available, and brings the publishers a return through ad revenue.   “It has taken us several years and several millions of dollars to build up this system,” said Gracenote’s Ross Blanchard. “Everything with publishing is more complicated than you think it will be.”   In these days of downloading songs, there’s a definite revenue stream for lyrics, as downloads don’t come with all the booklet extras – including lyrics – you’ll find in a physical CD. However, if you go looking for the legal but elusive words to that favorite song on Gracenote, be prepared: you won’t be able to copy and paste or print them.   And what do music publishers plan to do about all that unauthorised competition that’s already out there? Although they promise a reckoning in the future, for now they’re taking the softly-softly approach, rather than the jackboots of their colleagues in the RIAA.   It’s possible, too, that lyrics may well be embedded into the digital tracks you download in the future. Gracenote supplies iTunes with album and song data – the metatag – and as Apple’s AAC files have a lyrics tag that’s currently vacant, it would seem the logical next step.