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

Re:Not unexpected really

[Willeh]

Does this come up in every discussion? You might as well download them via Torrent/ Usenet.

All allofmp3.com does is throwing up a smokescreen that "we're in full compliance with the russian law", which I seriously doubt. So in all likelihood you're just supporting unethical behaviour, since I'm sure the russian law doesn't say anything about exporting (which is what selling to American citizens is, for all intents & purposes).

Bottom line: Downloading from illegal sources is about as kosher as downloading from allofmp3.com, and no amount of reasoning will achieve much, apart from soothing your own conscience.

Disclaimer: I have never paid for music online, I just download everything.

Re:Not unexpected really

[LunaticTippy]

I'd say the biggest difference between p2p and allofmp3 is the thousands of p2p lawsuits. No allofmp3 lawsuits. (yet?)

I've spoken with people who feel allofmp3 is lower risk.