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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."
The only way to sell music is to raise a conscious desire to buy it in the minds of potential buyers. Exposure to the lyrics is one of the simplest ways for songwriters to encouarge people to think about the music they write and expose others to it in a way that has no meaningful way of allowing them to substitute copyright infringement for actually buying the song. Guitar tabs, for example, are useless by themselves. They form typically just one of four components to a song, but someone playing the tabs down the hallway at college or on stage at a local bar raises consciousness of the song.
"Rights, rights, rights" is the mantra of the industry and why they're so amazingly stupid. The only way to sell a cultural work is to make it part of the culture and locking it up in a maze of contract law is not going to do that. Let people violate your Happy Jolly Lawyer Land Contract Rights all day long on things like lyrics. If you're in the business of selling **songs**, and that's how songwriters make most of their money on average, you WANT people sharing the lyrics and posting them in public. It's not the song, it's not even part of the actual audio they'll enjoy. It's just a collection of written words that they'd never have a reason to buy on their own as... surprise, surprise THEY'RE NOT MUSICIANS!!
Meanwhile, most musicians, when given the choice, will gladly buy your sheet music at a reasonable cost if it means they get a 100% accurate set of sheet music with lyrics.