Slashdot Mirror
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."
Not content with a life of disconnecting IRC users for fun, he's now joined the music industry? What a bastard >:|
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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...
There's no way Gracenote would make a deal like this unless they had an agreement that the record companies would bludgeon Gracenote's competition to death with copyright. It's no problem for the record companies and it makes what they are licensing to Gracenote so much more valuable.
It will probably be easier than going after people who share MP3s - lyrics sites are generally ad-supported, with the ad providers like Google mentioning copyright problems in their terms & conditions, so there's no need for lawyers, just complain to the advertisers and "cut off their air supply".
This won't be the first time this has happened, either. Anybody remember lyrics.ch? Raided by the police for telling people the words to songs! Does it get any more ridiculous?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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!
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Fair use is no longer an option and we can look forward to root kits on our computers to 'crack down' on illegal copying? I think it is time to tell the recording industry how we feel about their draconian measures. Could you go without purchasing or even downloading music for 3 months? 6 months? a year? to prove a point?
Top Ten Things the RIAA would Like To Make Illegal
10. Whistling, humming, scatting, finger snapping, head bobbing, and any other form of "grooving" (per the Groove Memorandum of 1982.)
9. Refusing the blue pill after attending an Outkast concert.
8. Not answering your cell on the 1st ring in order to hear to more of "Clocks."
7. Fair use? More like "unfair abuse", am I right!?
6. Quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace.
5. Thinking about quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace.
4. Thinking about thinking about quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace.
3. Being Taking Back Sunday. (I kid, I kid.)
2. Transferring all your iTunes songs to your new bigger iPod. (You've got money for a new bigger iPod, don't you?)
1. Not handing them all of your money, every day, the second you earn it.
I think this is just the music industry looking for revenue where they had previously written it off. Remember that they sued lyrics.ch (the original lyrics site) out of existance right before the MP3 phenomenon hit. Then when MP3's hit, people "stealing" lyrics (yeah, it even sounds funny...) looked like small potatoes compared to people "stealing" whole songs. Now that the've more or less accepted the fact that they're not going to be able to eliminate P2P completely, they're going after revenue wherever they can. I think it's going to be interesting to see them go after sites that are hosted in other (non Western friendly) countries. It'll be easy enough to take down the ones in the US, but I doubt they'll have much headway in Belize, Romania, Estonia, etc. They're having enough trouble with AllOfMP3.com, and that's in Russia. (I think)
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
On the one hand, this is another of those "it's our intellectual property, dammit" cases that seem so ridiculous - what is to stop lyrics sites from setting up shop in e.g. Russia, where it might be legally impossible to shut them down?
On the other hand, I hate those lyrics sites so much, I wish they would find a way to shut them down. They contain ads, popups, sometimes malicious content, and on top of that they often have mistakes in the lyrics.
So, I'm not sure I care that much about this one, personally.
WHere are all the comments?
"U.S. digital nerd news company OSTG has obtained licenses to distribute the comments to more than 1 million slashdot submissions. Editors are still mulling legal action against users that provide comments without authorization."
From the article:
"CmdrTaco, head honcho at slashdot, said licensing comments should boost worldwide comment publishing revenues, estimated at about $4 billion annually. CmdrTaco said he hopes the unauthorized users will seek subscriptions. 'I think we'll see a reasonable increase, as much as a 5 percent increase, in nerd news publishing revenues five years out from where we are right now,' CmdrTaco said."
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
Damn. Lost the link in all the /. server screwiness this morning: Here ya go, as originally written circa 3am:
Worse still, it will likely put this guy out of business, and that would be a cryin' shame.
When all lyrics are downloaded, and none have to be interpreted, something very important but likewise intangible about rock-n-roll is lost.
Tom Waits, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo Woo Woo.
Will these official lyrics come in encrypted, DRM'ed text files, and you aren't allowed to sing along once your licence runs out? :P
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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.
In other words : someone with a highly paid job inside a big corporation woke-up from his mid-afternoon doze and suddenly had a new idea :
Let's start charging money for something as stupid and obvious as song lyrics. Why haven't we though before ? There's so many new ways to rip money from our client base !
More money for my pocket and we can use the image of a starving artist to instill guilt inside the client's head. Just hope they won't notice the pointlessness of some recent work.
Yeah, let's call all free-rider that did provide the same service on their website "Pirates".
They're pirate ! They're ripping money from our starving artists. Think of the children, you terrorist !
Photocopying lyrics is killing the music indurty ! Pay us more for this service.
Let's launch suits against those pesky lyrics-pirate.
Are your dollars are belong to us !
You are on the way to legal actions !
Take off every 'Lawyer' !
For great justice and money !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Actually, the point is, nobody is going to say, "I don't have to buy that CD because I downloaded the lyrics for free and now I can sing it to myself whenever I want to hear it."
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
The most common way I discover new music is hearing it being played -- in a cafe or store, typically -- deciding I like the sound, and remembering a unique-sounding snippet of lyrics to Google later. That gives me the title and artist. From there I can buy the track on Rhapsody, or even buy the CD.
If they shut down the lyrics sites, I will buy much less music. Nice work there, RIAA.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I can see the commercial:
"Did you like Bob's latest song? Did you understand a single word he said? Well now you can understand them all! Call 1-800-LYR-IC4U, operators are standing by."
Don't think you can evade by simply not listening. After all, you could buy the stuff and not listen it anyway, therefore if you don't buy the stuff you're not listening to, it's clearly piracy, because after all, if you bought the stuff you don't listen to, they would make money from it, so if you don't buy the stuff you're not listening to, it's clearly theft.
Ah, and don't miss the new flat subscription model: At a fixed daily rate of just $10 per song, you're allowed to not listen to them as often as you want!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There was licensing for sheet music long, long before there was licensing for audio.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Who would pay, anyways? Paying a few bucks for lyrics still won't give you the right to do anything, such as perform the music in public. I think most of the lyrics use is very casual - just looking up a song to buy (OK, buy or pirate), or for amateur musicians to learn the song. But these people aren't going to pay any significant amount for lyrics. So where's the payoff?
Well, they found a better solution against unlicensed copies in your brain. Just remove the brain by brain surgery.
They already tested the method with their executives, and they found no negative side effects.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I do this all the time, and I disover new music that way. I certainly wouldn't pay to do it though - after all, I'm just deciding whether I like something enough to explore further. It's like this - hear it on the radio, search on Google, read lyrics of a few songs to get a feel for the band, maybe download a song or two (or listen to clips on Amazon), and if I'm still interested, buy something.
If I really enjoy music, a large part of that is because I like the lyrics. But I doubt I'd pay someone else to try out their product. You know, in some businesses, they pay YOU to try out the product.
As a musician, I put my lyrics up on my site for free so people can spend more time and thought on my songs, and perhaps be drawn to my site through search. Seems kinda obvious that this is a good thing for everyone.
The only plus I see to the Gracenote system is that "official" lyrics should be accurate. Personally I'd like to get them packaged with a download, so that if I'm listening to a song I can click and get the lyrics to come up with a bouncing ball on where I am in the song. Seems like that would be easy to program and add next to nothing to file size.
Just wait until they try to stop people humming songs on the bus, they may even start a pay for thought service where money is deducted from you bank every time you get an song stuck in you head. It all looks like copyright infringement to me.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Tabs came under fire a long while back. The MPA (Music Publisher's Association I believe...) just up and decided that tabs (no matter how musically inaccurate they may be) were infringing on the sound of their copyrighted material. The head of the MPA went as far as to say he would push to have owners of tab sites fined AND jailed - needless to say, I don't think the latter has happened.
Anyway, this shut down many popular tab sites, most notably taborama.com (along with their forum on a different domain) and mxtabs.net. While Taborama remains closed, MXTabs argued that they pay music associations to licence the material on their site, and hence have the right to offer tabs and lyrics to users. They, along with most tab and lyrics sites, remain open.
As far as I know, the MPA really hasn't made any effort to actually enforce or take action on the threats they made. Most speculate that they just used the 'scare tatic' to get their way.
In my own personal opinion, the worries of these music associations is quite farfetched. Tab and lyrics sites are notorious for being somewhat inaccurate, which is scary considering that these groups are going after things that almost violate their copyright, although they may not always do so.
What' next? Lawsuits against people who happen to overhear their coworkers playing a CD in the cubicle next door? Against people who sing along with their favorite song? Against songwriters who use words in their songs that happen to appear in the songs of others ('love,' 'you,' 'the'...)? It's a slippery slope that we know the music industry is dying to tumble down.
You'd think publishers would realize that easy access to their lyrics makes their product more valuable, not less...
Absolutely! Easy access to song lyrics has also caused me to buy new music before. Numerous times when I'm listening to the radio in my car a rockin' song will play and the ignorant announcer never tells who the band was. My trick is to remember a phrase from the song and later type the phrase and the work lryics into google. This is how I discovered the White Strips.
Charging for lyrics seems to be a way for the recording industry to continue shooting themselves in the foot.
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
And this is part of why every restaurant I go to has their own special "Happy Birthday" rendition.
If you want a grand example of why it's good for things to eventually become part of the public domain, then that has to be the prime one.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
MxTabs has recently shut down, if you go to mxtabs all you will get is a few paragraphs explaiming that they have shut down.
Extortion, they don't care how the lyric sites come up with the money, they're going to be ordered to pay or face a lawsuit.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
The big mistake you are making here is believing the media companies in thier false assertion (enforced with technology) that music or movies are different in different places in the world.
Just because there may be no law about exporting - which allofmp3.com asserts they are within the law - does not mean that it is illegal or unethical. The US has no law against the import of music, Russia has no law against export, so the transit is within the law.
The issue with allofp3.com is not the same as torrents, it is a bigger issue: how do we have soveriegn nations with diffefent laws coexist on the web without balkanizing the internet? Philosophers predictied teh end of hte nation-state with the advent of the internet, and what we are seeing is either that or the demise of our happy, open, universal internet
Interestingly, the reason the lyrics were licensed and not the audio was because player pianos and other synthesizers were starting to take fold, and music was beginning to be viewed from an almost entirely scientific point of view. So musicmakers figured in the future when music was automatically created, the only money would be in original lyrics (which presumably couldn't be mechanically generated. Pre-Markov, and all ...) Also, while eerily similar music could be argued to be so different as to be original, lyrics offered no such ambiguity.
Also, when they say "music publishers", they really only mean The Harry Fox Agency, which owns the lyrical rights to basically every major-label song ever. Everyone else is very small fry compared to them.
I doubt they can charge a lot and see it get used a lot. Frankly, an ad driven site that actually provides accurate content without all the malware would be great and might do well for them and for the songwriters (yes these folks will potentially get money, especially the more recent ones since agreements have gotten better for them). Tying it into Gracenote's services would be fine for most consumers, but not me (I'm a FreeDB kinda guy). Trying to charge a monthly fee for this would probably fail and per use micro payments doesn't seem like a winner either.
Who will pay? Probably the same people who pay for ringtones.
"I don't need drugs to enjoy this, just to enhance it" - Otto
Y3st3rd4y
4ll my troubl3s s33m3d so f4r 4w4y
Now it loo| Oh, I b3li3v3 in y3st3rd4y
Sudd3nly
I'm not h4lf th3 m4n I us3d 2 b3
Th3r3's 4 sh4dow h4nging ov3r m3
Oh, y3st3rd4y c4m3 sudd3nly
Why sh3 h4d 2 go I don't know
sh3 wouldn't s4y.
I s4id som3thing wrong
now I long for y3st3rd4y
Y3st3rd4y
lov3 w4s such 4n 34sy g4m3 2 pl4y
Now I n33d 4 pl4c3 2 hid3 4w4y
Oh, I b3li3v3 in y3st3rd4y
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
"Could you go without purchasing or even downloading music for 3 months? 6 months? a year? to prove a point?"
Geez, I hope so.
If you can't find enough music to listen to here or here or here or here or here or here then I pity you. But try here or here before giving up entirely.My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
(IANAL) In Eurpoe, you aren't allowed to sing a song in public that's not yours. That was already against the law; it's public performance of someone else's work. In the USA, public performance of another's material is acceptable providing that the performance is your own (e.g., you can't sit on your front porch with your boombox nor roll your car windows down while playing a CD*, because the performance being emitted to the general public is the original artist's). At least, these things are all true in commerce, but might not apply to nonprofit events: if you are strumming nirvana on a guitar on a streetcorner, and you will only play when someone puts money in your hat, you're charging for your performance; if you just put your hat down hoping for tips (but don't TELL people to give you tips--although maybe you can say that you'd appreciate tips---you definitely can't request it of them, even if you play regardless of getting tipped), that might be OK (but it could be illegal on panhandling/loitering/solicitation/public nuisance/trespassing/harrassment/public endangerment/noise violation---basically, if a cop doesn't like you, he'll find SOME way to arrest you), and if you don't take tips at all you're probably OK.
;)
* = I am not sure about radio. It might be OK to play radio with your windows down, because it's broadcast on [sort-of] public channels.
It'd be cool if a bunch of independent artists got together and ran a free lyrics database (minimal and non-annoying advertising, reproductions allowed under various terms on a song-by-song basis, maybe also mentioning public performance and recording covers policies alongside [e.g., creative commons licenses]) lyrics database, AND specifically forbid gracenote from using their lyrics in any way.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
There isn't any payoff, that's the whole stupid thing about this. Charging for lyrics? Come on. This isn't something the artists are pushing for, they want their songs played (music and lyrics). There aren't many artists out there writing meaningful poetry that you'd even CONSIDER paying for it. This is clearly an excessive use of copyright as a means of revenue; something it was NEVER intended to do. I think the next dumbass thing the MPAA will try is to charge bands to cover songs at any live performance. You want to see the music biz come to grinding halt, that will certainly do it. No one will want to create music if they can't learn from what came before. 99.999999% of all musicians started off listening to their favorite bands and then trying to play their songs, LONG before they ever wrote a song of their own. Now the record companies want to nickel and dime people to death and completely kill their power base. Good for them. They can be the cause of their own overly late demise.
I tried to post this last night, but alas the system was down for maintenance.
The music industry also announced their next move was to create a pay to play initiative targetting mp3 players. For too long have people been able to conveniently play our music over and over again. This type of longetivity in the digital format does not allow for breakage of the media from over-use. "We want popular songs to of course generate more income through requiring people to purchase new CDs, Cassettes, 8 tracks or vinyl" said one executive. To that end they've begun lobbying Apple and several other MP3 player vendors to include a counting system that will transmit a record of all songs played and the amount wireless to a network they intend to set up. They say users will get a bill once a month requiring them to pay for the amount of music they listened to. Customers who's accounts are not kept up to date will find their Ipods and other musical devices will cease to function. They've also announced a partnership with a man known only as Borris to help with collection.
If I'm a good example of the casual user of lyrics, this will only cost them money.
A vast majority of the time when I'm looking for lyrics it's because I have just heard (or remember) a fragment of a song and want to know who wrote/performed it so I can buy it.
I sure as hell am not going to pay to search a database of lyrics just so I can then turn around to buy it. Why bother?
They're just going to lose sales from people like me.
"Clearly, singing a song out loud should require induce a fee."
Hate to break it to you, but it already does.
In a lot of places, cover bands have to pay license fees. The fact that you're getting away with singing in the shower is probably just 'cause they dont have microphones and inspectors there.
Expect that to be rectified in the near future.
Is that because the book that came with the CD didn't have the lyrics?
There are countless times where I have bought a CD and wanted to know the lyrics to a song, and the book only had credits information. It makes me so mad. How do they expect us to sing (or maybe they don't want us to sing since we're not a licensed performer) a song if we can't understand the words or if the lyrics are not given to us?
I think many of these sites for lyrics are doing it because a lot of albums still get published with no lyrics in the included book. There are people correcting as well (a Wiki lyrics would be great for this) when there's no official lyrics printed anywhere (except in an overly expensive sheet book, who buys those for rap (yes they do make rap ones)?).
I think it's a similar situation with guitar tabs online. Although I hate these in general and never really used them (I learn by ear damnit, and you should try it someday!), plus more than half on these sites are wrong or poorly written IMO. But the thing is, the alternative is to buy the sheet book, but these generally cost $15 or more, the same or more than the cost of the CD. If they lowered the price on these sheet books to between $3 and $8 I would probably have more sheet books (although I still learn by ear 90% of the time, even if that includes taking the audio into Sound Forge and time stretching it to be slower).
Um, they already do. Any bar you see that has a band pays money to allow music to be performed. Any festival or outdoor venue does too.
From WSU's page (which says the same as other pages, just in an understandable format):
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.