When there is a song on the radio that interests you, pretty often you do want to know exactly what the singer says - to sing along with the song don't you? Lots of people do apparently, and hence the popularity of lyrics sites. For any given song that you look up, you're guaranteed to find it on at least a half dozen sites with names like azlyrics, elyrics, stlyrics, metrolyrics and so on. Did you ever wonder how these people could publish all these lyrics to hit songs (and get all the annoying advertising on the side as a reward to pay them for their trouble) and not have the songwriters or the record labels sue them for some kind of copyright infringement? Here are these people publishing someone elses copyrighted creative work and profiting from it. Doesnt that just cry out for some kind of action from these companies that will sue college students for $100,000 if they catch them sharing peer-to-peer? Actually, that last lyrics website, Metrolyrics, just found out about this the hard way.
Metrolyrics reportedly got its start 10 years ago when a high school student, a boy called Milun, found that he could never find the words for the songs he loved when he looked on the Internet. So he just happened to start his own website as a kind of gag; and he put up the words to lots of songs. Pretty soon, there were so many visitors at his site for his free lyrics that he was beginning to make advertising money. The Website is pretty successful now, with millions of dollars in advertising revenues and more than 10 million visitors each month. All these free lyrics though were written by hard-working musicians elsewhere. Songwriters who often dont feel that they are compensated enough for their hard work and creativity, are often gratified to see their lyrics in such demand; they just wish they could be up for some kind of a share. All theyve ever had all these years have been pennies earned off printed lyrics for songs and sheet music.
And so songwriters and the record labels that represent them, have been getting a little pushy with the lyrics sites - to get them in on the action. Not that the lyrics websites are unwilling; its just that there is no system in place for lyrics royalty collection the way there is for music royalty collection. There are just so many songwriters and publishers out there; theres no system that could easily get all of them together in one place to help distribute the pennies around. Help is at hand now though with businesses called license aggregators examples would be companies like Gracenote; these are prominent in this area. Companies like these go around gathering licenses and permission from the thousands of songwriters and record labels out there, to try to mediate between them and the sites that publish lyrics for songs.
When websites do not play nice with the lyrics licensors, some of them are forced to shut down. There are about a hundred sites that publish lyrics for songs on the Internet; and ever since third-party license aggregators like Gracenote came into the picture, a handful of them have begun to do it legally. The others are beginning to feel a bit of pressure with a few lawsuits mounted against them. Lots of these websites operate outside the US, and of course theres no way to get on their case there.
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