Legal Lyrics to be Available Soon

[Damion Chaplin]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6094174.html' target='_blank'>http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6094174.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"U.S. digital entertainment company Gracenote on Thursday said it obtained licenses to distribute lyrics as music publishers mulled legal action against Web sites that provide them without authorization... Gracenote obtained the rights to the lyrics of more than 1 million songs from the North American catalogs of Bertelsmann AG's BMG Music Publishing, Vivendi's Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, jointly owned by Sony and Michael Jackson, peermusic and other publishers. Gracenote also said it was talking with all of its partners, including Yahoo and Apple Computer's iTunes, about its plans to launch a service to offer legal and accurate lyrics for all digital media. The service, to be initially available in North America, would be the first industry-backed move to provide lyrics legally, Gracenote said. Until now, consumers' access to song lyrics has been largely through unauthorized sources, which usually provide inaccurate content, the company said."</i><br /><br />I guess I knew that lyrics were copywritten works, but I guess I never thought of it as infringement if I looked up the lyrics online. Turns out it's infringement for fan sites to even list lyrics without permission from the artist and studio. As I said, it makes sense when you think about it, but it hardly seems worth fretting about. I guess it's nice to know that sometime soon official, correct lyrics will be available online, but I feel bad for the sites that have been faithfully helping me decrypt artists' lyrics for many years now. I think they deserve some compensation for doing the studios' job all these years. Like a free license to host lyrical content, so I don't lose my fan-based resources, which I prefer to support. What about you? Are you a frequent lyrics researcher? Are you happy to see official lyrics being made available, or sad to see your fan-based resources being taken down?

[Jason Dunn]

As someone who has used lyrics sites to get lyrics for songs I'm performing, I really value them as a resource. Quite often, the official music sites either don't have the lyrics, or if they do, they're in some stupid Flash "experience" that makes it impossible to copy the lyrics out of. Frankly, I see no commercial value in lyrics and think they should give permission to these third party sites to re-publish them. The music is what sells.

[mrozema]

I'm slightly torn... It would be really nice to have official (band-approved?) lyrics for music, since some fan sites I've visited haven't been entirely accurate.

On the other hand, I am opposed to restricting access to those lyrics. As Jason said, the music is what sells. Imagine having to pay for them? It seems trivial to have to do that.

[Filip Norrgard]

Ha! :P Looks like legal lyrics have missed the train! :lol:

Real (musical) artists put their lyrics on their own website and in HTML, not in any freaky wannabe flash page. More should follow the example of some of the artists on this side of the pond:
http://www.donjohnsonbigband.com/en/lyrics/road/
http://www.poetsofthefall.com/?p=809

It's better to get the lyrics from the horse's mouth than anywhere else, no? :)

[KTamas]

Wow... I didn't know you can't put lyrics on your website legally...that's kinda crazy, I mean, this should be in "fair use" as long as they state "we didn't write this, x.y. wrote it".

But, as Filip said, some artists do put their lyrics on their websites(Nightwish comes in my mind for an example), and everyone should do that.