The Harry Fox Agency, which collects licensing fees for music publishers (the people who own rights to lyrics and melody, as opposed to the actual sound recording itself), announced an arrangement with LyricFind which will allow any of Harry Fox's thirty thousand member publishers to enter and edit their song lyrics into a database. LyricFind will then license this database so that new lyric-driven applications can be developed (I think some kind of online lyrics quiz could be a hit, for instance), and so that online music services will be able to integrate song lyrics.
Does this mean you'll have to take down lyrics you've posted on your fan site? According to Darryl Ballantyne of LyricFind, you won't. "There are no plans with us at this point to target small sites, fan sites, or other minor infringers. While technically they are violating copyright, they aren’t really much of a concern to us. We’re more concerned with the larger sites that host hundreds of thousands of lyrics and generate significant traffic."
Whew.
I also asked Ballantyne whether this will mean the end of those cheesy, annoying, traffic-grabbing lyrics sites, and the beginning of "legit" lyrics services that will provide new applications for lyrics.
He responded, "Yes, hopefully! We want to license as many sites as possible and provide them with high quality content and metadata, and elevate them to a point where... [they can] can start dealing with legitimate advertisers and get rid of the adware... In fact, as a general rule, we won’t work with sites that install adware/spyware unless they agree to remove it."
Existing lyrics sites won't disappear; instead, they could change, becoming less annoying in the process: "We’re also working with a number of large portal sites to integrate lyrics into their existing music data. We definitely want to keep the existing sites around, though, and capitalize on their traffic – and hopefully clean them up in the process!"
Among other things, the existence of LyricFind will probably mean that aside from displaying artist bio text, certain MP3 players will start displaying lyrics as songs play. My vote is for a "follow the bouncing ball" type interface.
