Music Industry Looking for Lyrics Payoff

theodp writes "U.S. digital entertainment company Gracenote has obtained licenses to distribute the lyrics of more than 1 million songs. Music publishers are still mulling legal action against Web sites that provide lyrics without authorization." From the article: "Ralph Peer II, Firth's counterpart at peermusic, said licensing lyrics should boost worldwide music publishing revenues, estimated at about $4 billion annually. Peer said he hopes the unauthorized sites will seek licenses. 'I think we'll see a reasonable increase, as much as a 5 percent increase, in industry music publishing revenues five years out from where we are right now,' Peer said."

Comments

Great...

[John Betonschaar]

Now all we need is some form of DRM that makes you pay every time you read the lyrics, or someone reads them to you. And then some lawsuits for people that steal the lyrics by transcripting, storing or sharing them with others... Because we all know you just cannot remember and or write down stuff you hear on television or radio, or even worse, save other people the hassle of having to write them down themselves...

It's 'bout time them lyrics-stealing pirate bastards start paying for their criminal behaviour...

Not unexpected really

[Heir Of The Mess]

Afterall the lyrics are copyrighted, the same as music, movies, and books, but it has been a nice way to track down "that song" that you heard on the radio by just typing a few of the lyrics you heard into Google. Well I guess that's dead. The music companies have shown they are willing to do anything to get every last cent they can using their old ways. Watching a subtitled music video has a lot of copyrights attached to it: The lyrics, the musical note order, the performance by the artist, the video, and potentially the font used to show the lyrics in the subtitles. From all the effort that has gone into producing those parts they need their due payment, afterall with rising fuel prices its getting very expensive to run enormous yaghts and exotic car collections.

Eventually the media companies are going to push too hard. Many big companies like to ride the line, and it seems legally that with the current political influence they have the media companies can keep on moving that line so they don't cross it. The question is, where has the consumer market set that line? People might express some negative feelings about record companines extorting money from single mothers living in poverty, but they still keep on buying, so I guess that line hasn't been reached yet either. There's too many other things to worry about these days...like not being able to post a comment on slashdot for 6+ hours because Database maintenance is taking place. Noooo!