Billboard Introduces A Chart For Lyrics

Billboard already has over 100 charts, so you'd think that there wouldn't be a need for another one. The company found room for a couple more by introducing a new US and International LyricFind Charts, which show the songs with the most search queries for the lyrics.

The charts are based upon the data mined from LyricFind, the market leader for lyric licensing, synchronization and reporting.

The company has issued lyric licenses to more than 100 services already, including Amazon, Pandora, Shazam and Yahoo. It specializes in taking the burden of licensing and collecting royalties for lyrics from publishers, who generally choose to spend most of their time on other parts of the business with a greater royalty payout.

While on the surface one might wonder the need for such a chart, it's actually pretty interesting in that so many consumers regularly search for lyrics, in many cases almost as much as the actual song itself. It's no surprise that the chart closely mirrors the Hot 100 chart in that it's mostly populated by the most popular songs of the moment.

In our data-driven Music 4.0 world, the LyricFind Chart is just another useful piece to help frame the success of a song. It's been a long time coming.

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Google Now Provides Automatic Song Lyrics

For years dedicated lyric sites have been both the bane and glory of music publishers. If the lyrics were unlicensed, then that was obviously taking money form the the artists that the publisher represented as well as the publisher itself. Of course, if the lyrics were licensed then that was another source of income. As a result, quite a few fully licensed lyric sites like LyricFind and Musixmatch began to dominate the space.

They may be in for a rough time though, now that Google is incorporating lyrics into the results of any search for a song, as you can see from the graphic on the left. The lyrics are now part of Google Play (as you can see here for the Foo Fighters song) and are in a large database that's totally licensed from the publishers. No, you don't need to be a Google Play subscriber to access them.

Many of the current lyric sites are crowd sourced, so you can never be sure if the lyrics are correct or not. With Google's licenses in place, this is no longer the case, plus the lyrics are now easily accessible via the link in the search results.

Why did Google do this, you might ask? For Google, the search experience itself is paramount. You can see this in its rankings, where a page with a good user experience consistently ranks higher one where info is difficult to find. It seems that Google is using the same criteria on itself as well.

Amazon Prime Adds Music: The Good And The Bad

As predicted, Amazon Prime has joined the ranks of music streaming services today as its new Prime Music service has now gone live. This is a natural extension of the offerings available on Prime, which began as a $50 program to ensure free two-day shipping of purchased items from the online store. Since that initial conception, the program has expanded to include movies and television titles as well as books. Let’s look at the pros and cons of Prime Music as it now appears.

The Good

It’s a potential way to increase music sales. At least that’s how it’s being sold to record labels, and the company has an argument in that Amazon DVD sales have increased since Prime was introduced. The service has included Buy buttons that make it easy to fill out an existing music catalog that you might already have, but the big question still exists - why buy it if you can get it any time you want? Movies and TV shows rotate out of Amazon’s catalog all the time, so that might be a compelling argument to buy a DVD of something if it’s your favorite, but the rights issues involved in music prevent that from happening, although the average Prime customer may not be aware of that fact.

There’s no advertising on the service. This is a plus for the user but it also should be expected for a premium tier service. 

Many songs are synched with lyrics. Many, but not all, of the songs offered in the Prime Music catalog offer simultaneous lyric availability thanks to a deal with LyricFind. That’s not such a big deal for some people, a bigger one for others, but it is a unique feature of the service.

Lots of playlists. Curated music is the word of the day in the streaming music world and every service is now making darn sure that they have a horse in the race. Prime Music is no exception, as the company is said to have recruited a team of music experts to create to create hundreds of playlists that range from “best of’s” to ones tailored to a specific mood. Read more on Forbes.

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