The NMPA Wants to Stop "Pirate" Lyric Sites

I remember sitting at the kitchen table when I was about nine years old and painstakingly writing out the lyrics to a song so I could “perform” it on the school playground with my friends (B*Witched’s “C’est la Vie,” if you must know). This was before the iPod era, so the process involved listening to few lines, pausing the CD to scribble down the words, then rewinding to check I’d got them right, again and again.

That’s a pastime today’s playground pop stars probably haven’t experienced, thanks to the proliferation of lyric sites that take all the hard work out of trying to decipher exactly what’s being sung, rapped, or otherwise articulated in your favourite songs.

But now the National Musical Publishers’ Association (NMPA) is taking action against the top unlicensed lyric sites, could it be time to go back to pen and paper?

The NMPA announced it had sent takedown notices to the top 50 unlicensed lyric sites in the name of anti-piracy. A list of “undesirable lyric websites” was put together by David Lowery, who is both a lecturer in music business at the University of Georgia and a musician in alt rock bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. In the report, Lowery explained his selection methodology, which essentially involved searching for popular song lyrics to see which websites came up first (and some Excel spreadsheet skills).

In the great music piracy battle, lyric sites might seem like a drop in the ocean of copyright infringement. Sharing song lyrics hardly seems comparable to ripping off an mp3; it’s not like people ever bought CDs for the lyrics booklet. But there’s one reason music publishers are now taking an interest in lyric sites: they’re making money.

“There is anecdotal evidence that these lyric websites generate huge web traffic and may involve more money than one might think,” Lowery wrote in the introduction to his list, and pointed out that, “Based on the popularity of lyric searches,it is possible that unlike the sound recording business, the lyric business may be more valuable in the Internet age.”

The NMPA said there are over 5 million google searches for “lyrics” every day, and that 50 percent of lyric sites are unlicensed. That's a lot of potential profit from advertising—and the NMPA want songwriters to get a cut. In their announcement, the organisation’s president and CEO David Israelite said personal blogs, fan sites, and legal sites would be safe, and that they were only targeting sites that engaged in “blatant illegal behavior, which significantly impacts songwriters' ability to make a living.”

But the list of “undesirable” sites targeted has raised questions of what does and doesn’t count as fair use when it comes to lyrics. The NMPA’s number one offender is Rap Genius, but that site doesn’t just mindlessly copy and paste lyrics in a bid for more clicks. The songs are often meticulously annotated by users, which could put them in the category of a transformative work. In a statement to the New York Times, Ilan Zechory, one of the site's founders, said, “The lyrics sites the NMPA refers to simply display song lyrics, while Rap Genius has crowdsourced annotations that give context to all the lyrics line by line, and tens of thousands of verified annotations directly from writers and performers. These layers of context and meaning transform a static, flat lyric page into an interactive, vibrant art experience created by a community of volunteer scholars.”

That’s not to say Rap Genius isn’t interested in profit; the site attracted a $15 million investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz last year, and it's clearly worth a fair amount.

But even when it comes to sites that just offer clumsily formatted lyrics against a backdrop of banner ads, it’s hard to see the NMPA winning this fight. They might succeed in taking down some current major players—they’ve previously successfully litigated against LiveUniverse and LyricWiki—but it seems inevitable that new unlicensed sites will pop up to take their place, just as we’ve seen with other types of music piracy, such as illegal downloading.

At least no one can tell how the lyrics you're singing along to were obtained.