News October 27, 2015

Feature: Online Lyric Licensing – Part Two

Former Editor

Bob Aird, Managing Director of Universal Music Publishing Australia, says that UMPG didn’t assess Australian infringing lyric sites in the manner the NMPA did in the US, but he believes Australia faces a similar plight.

“We haven’t got a survey [on the analytics of unlicensed sites] but I imagine we would be very similar.”

Similarly, AMPAL doesn’t have information on where the infringing lyric sites are based, and therefore has no knowledge of how many, if any, infringing sites are Australia-based, however its GM Jeremy Fabinyi says the research carried out by NMPA “is broadly applicable to Australia.”

Traditionally, lyrics were included in liner notes as a service to fans and later published in pop music print media like UK magazine Smash Hits, where often its selling point in the ‘80s and ‘90s was the publication of Top 20 song lyrics. Arguably, publishing lyrics in album sleeves and pop music magazines didn’t raise revenue for the artist, the publisher or the label, but it did show societies that lyrics could be monetised. Fans took cues from print media and launched lyric-dedicated sites. Those sites became competitive, lucrative sources of revenue. Despite their user-generated, unreviewed, often visually unappealing composition, a line had been crossed into copyright infringement.

Australian fansite for Sydney artist Josh Pyke, friendsofjoshpyke.com, features lyrics, however it’s endorsed by Pyke and his music company Wonderlick Entertainment. There’s also deltadaily.com for fans of Delta Goodrem and justinbieberfansiteaus.com for local Beliebers. The local Bieber fansite was shut down, but Delta Daily remains active and even features advertisements. It would seem that depending on the artist and their relationship with their fans and/or their publisher, some acts wholly support the publication of their song lyrics on fan sites. LyricFind has stated that their main targets for licensing are not fan sites or personal blogs, but rather large scale websites and music services that drive significant volume.

“If fan sites are not generating revenue, they haven’t got advertising or branding on the site and they have permission from the artist, then we would generally regard it as promotion however we will issue take down notices if the songwriter requests us to do so or if there is an infringement of our rights. I would expect that all fan sites are correctly licensed,” says Aird.

Copyright infringement occurs with the use of sheet music too. The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) had success with the Pianofiles.com website in June. After a long-winded letter writing campaign spearheaded by ICMP with global music publishers, Pianofiles full repository of classical sheet music will be shut down on December 2. ICMP’s Anti-Piracy Committee is now looking to take further steps using similar actions on a more global level.

Book, periodical and sheet music publisher Music Sales – which has an office in Sydney and has been licensing sheet music since its inception more than a century ago – is also covered under the new blanket license. It receives a percentage of revenue from LyricFind through APRA AMCOS.

The battle is ongoing; in July the NMPA filed copyright infringement lawsuits against lyric sites SeekLyrics and LyricsTime after negotiations with both failed to stop them from publishing copyrighted material. Both sites have been taken offline.

In early May, an agreement between publishers and hip hop lyrics source Rap Genius ended a longstanding dispute. In November last year the NMPA included Rap Genius at the top of its 50-strong list of infringing lyric websites and filed take-down notices against all of them. The year prior in October 2012, Rap Genius received a $15 million investment injection from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capitalist firm in California, partly due to its high traffic numbers – Rap Genius received 5.3 million monthly unique visitors from desktop computers in the US alone (comScore).

Rap Genius’ co-founder Ilan Zechory had continued to brush off the take-down notices maintaining: “Rap Genius has crowdsourced annotations that give context to all the lyrics line by line, and tens of thousands of verified annotations directly from writers and performers. These layers of context and meaning transform a static, flat lyric page into an interactive, vibrant art experience created by a community of volunteer scholars.”

However when Rap Genius entered a licensing deal with Sony/ATV Publishing, despite facing lawsuits from other publishers, in November 2013, it finally agreed to a deal with NMPA.

While Rap Genius may offer a more in-depth, aesthetically pleasing source for lyrics, LyricFind’s main goal, aside from providing proper compensation for publishers and songwriters, is quality control.

“Quality is one of the key factors that differentiates us from other services,” says Ballantyne. “Most unlicensed services have terrible content that has been submitted by users and is highly-inaccurate, and inconsistently formatted. One of the great benefits of an unlicensed site switching to us (beyond the obvious legal benefit) is that they no longer have to do the work to maintain that database.

“Of course, our larger customers like Amazon, Pandora, HTC and others have a reputation of providing high quality services, and look to us to maintain those standards,” Ballantyne continues. “They wouldn’t be using us if our quality wasn’t up to their high standards.”

LyricFind has reported growth of close to 200% in the last year with most royalty payments made in the US. Its team of 30 features a dozen staff members who monitor quality control and cover six different languages. It even has a separate, dedicated team in China working exclusively on Chinese lyrics.

“We have licenses in place with legitimate websites to allow people to access those lyrics legally which also ensures that songwriters are remunerated,” says Universal Music Publishing MD Bob Aird. “If we don’t give consumers the option of legal sites how can we go to them and say ‘don’t access illegal sites’.”

This article is taken from the November issue of the Australian Music Business Review.If you'd like a hardcopy of themagazine pleasecontact us.

Image above-right: LyricFind co-founder Darryl Ballantyne